


The Gunpowder Files

by Tawabids



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Ableism, Antisemitism, Charles' Parents Are Terrible People Here, Drug Use, M/M, Minor Character Deaths, Morally Grey Protagonists, Possessive relationship, Violence, kinkmeme fill, lots of death, victorian au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:45:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a 19th century Britain, the wealthy Xavier-Marko couple pay Erik, a hired killer, to put their disabled son Charles "out of his misery". Instead, Erik saves Charles from dealing with those kind of parents ever again. Charles follows Erik back to London and eventually convinces the assassin to take him under his wing and teach him the trade. When their lives cross paths with a destructive opium cartel led by the shadowy Sebastian Shaw, they decide to take down the businessman down no matter the cost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally posted [here at the 1stclass_kink community](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/8359.html?thread=17837735). The original text was "In a semi-historical-maybe-maybe-not AU, Erik is known to be very dangerous and a smooth operator, killin' bad dudes and somehow getting away with it. I...don't know how. One day, this horrible rich family offers to pay Erik to kill their disabled son, "putting him out of his misery". Erik says eff that, and just gets Charles to leave with him when he skips town. They fight whatever it is that Erik fights in this fic. I am disabled and would like to vent frustrations, feel self-righteous, and experience vicarious handsome shark kisses."
> 
> For this reason there is a significant amount of horrible behaviour towards Charles' disability in this fic, and any readers who may find this triggering are asked to proceed with caution. I have tried to keep the ableism as a facet of the characters and objectively treat Charles with respect, but I am always open to discussion and criticism in this regard. 
> 
> I absolutely loved writing this fic because I got to write morally-grey badasses and lots of violence, but I never thought I'd bother to repost it, so hopefully there's some new readers out there who might enjoy it.
> 
>  
> 
> ETA: NOW WITH BESTEST ART EVER FROM CLAWFOOTTUB ([here on Ao3](http://archiveofourown.org/works/381339/chapters/995389) and [here on tumblr](http://clawfoottub.tumblr.com/post/35305784260/my-illustration-for-tawabids-the-gunpowder)). 

_Get the key in, beastly thing, where’s it gone? Forget it, kick the lock in, hope none of the neighbours heard, find the lamp – someone’s run the oil out, never mind, get to the safe, that’s it, great iron toad of a thing – got the combination but can’t see the bloody tumbler, need a match – don’t drop them, curse your hands, light it, that’s better, looks like someone’s been here already tonight, workers making trouble, they don’t know the combination, don’t panic – who’s that? Who’s sitting there by the hall door? **Who the blazes is that?**_

“John?” the man in the chair asked. Young guy, tweed jacket and neatly parted hair. “John Allerdyce?” 

“Who’re you?” John spat. The match in his fingers sizzled and went out, but he’d seen a candle stub on top of the safe and he fumbled for it, scraping a fresh match down the cast-iron box. The man was still sitting there when the smoky wick ignited. Funny place to put a chair, right there in the doorway. “Are you one of Duke’s cronies?”

“Goodness, no,” said the man with a warm smile. “I’m not anybody’s crony. But you know, I was just thinking how sorry it was that we missed you, John.”

“Missed me?” John laughed. “Well I’m here now. What do you want?”

“I want you to turn yourself in,” the man said, inclining his head a little. “You understand that the cartel is collapsing at an astounding rate, I’m sure, or you would not be so hastily trying to retrieve the banknotes in that safe.”

John took a step away from the safe. “Who’re you? The bloody salvation army?”

“I’m just the oracle of good advice, John,” the man said. It was odd as a gull in britches that he was just sitting there, placid as anything. His hands were resting on the arms of his chair and there was a rug covering his legs, a warm woollen afghan like John’s nan used to make before the winter got her. John took another step around the desk and he began to laugh as he saw the chair for what it was.

“Can’t give naught but advice, can you, gimp?” he straightened up, his grin shining yellow in the candlelight. 

The man continued to smile genially, not even flinching at the force John thrust behind his final word. “Come on now, John. Let’s go into the street and I’ll escort you to the yard. I’m sure you know the names of plenty other dealers in this little ring, and the police will offer you plenty of years off your sentence in return.”

“You sound like you know an awful lot about us yourself,” John sneered, reaching into his coat and pulling out the flick-knife he’d taken off his father’s cooling body, all those years ago. He opened it with a snap. “Here’s a thought. You tell me which of those bludger’s ‘as put you up to this and I’ll only cut off the bits of you that you ain’t usin’ anyway.”

He placed the candle on top of the nearest cabinet and a drip of wax hissed as it melted into the varnish. John held the knife away from his body, spinning it in his palm and between his fingers, his grin growing broader as he advanced on the man sitting in the doorway. “Come on, grandpa,” he jerked his chin. “Spill it.”

There was a movement, like a raptor flicking its wings. John registered a flash of steel and the crack of a pistol going off. The weight of the knife was gone from John’s hand, and a moment later the pain struck like a lightning bolt. He lifted his arm and found he could look right through the place where his ring finger and half of his pinky had been a moment before. Blood was gushing and dripping in runnels down the back of his hand and into the sleeve of his shirt. 

John gave a low moan and fell back against the door of the safe with a clang. White flashes popped at the edges of his vision as he shifted his eyes to the man in the chair. The man sat serene, the smile gone from his face, the pistol outstretched in his hand and pointing directly at the centre of John’s forehead.

“You shot my fingers off!” John cried.

“You should have held the knife still,” the man replied coolly, his eyes narrowing just a little. The candle flickered, casting deep shadows into the hallway behind him. 

“I’ll – I’ll rip your eyes out of your skull you sodding bastard—“ 

The man gave the tiniest shake of his head, his gaze never leaving John’s face. “Oh, I wouldn’t try it, my friend,” he said softly. “I really wouldn’t.”


	2. the ambulance driver

_Two Years Earlier_

"I presume," Erik said, tapping the ashes from his pipe into Mrs Marko's faux-oriental vase of carnations, "that this is about money."

Mr and Mrs Marko looked at each other, she twisting her ring-adorned hands and he gripping the arm of the embroidered sofa as if trying to rip it off. Finally Mr Marko cleared his throat, "That is absurd, Mr Eisen. As Sharon has said, it has simply grown unbearable to watch our dear son wither away in this house, with no company or hope for the future--"

"Listen," Erik cut him off, and there was a growl in his voice that made Mr Marko's face turn fried-egg white. "You can tell yourself and your friends what you like, it don't make a lick of difference to me. But if I take a job, I need to know the specifics of it. That includes an understanding of the consequences you're hoping will come out of it. You got me?"

Mrs Marko nodded frantically, and Mr Marko put his hand over hers and clutched it tight. He took a breath. "How much do you... know about our... family?"

"I heard your boy got turned down for marriage last month," Erik leaned back in the armchair and began to repack his pipe, waving it at Mr Marko, "to your niece. I'm assuming there's an inheritance and a trust fund in there somewhere."

"A very, very large trust fund," Mr Marko's voice gained a little strength. "The majority of Mr Xavier's - Sharon's first husband's - estate and assets. When Charles turns twenty-five next year he gains full control of it. That money should equally be Sharon's, Mr Eisen," a little blood returned to his cheeks and he puffed up his chest, "Sharon's and mine and my son Cain's. If he'd married, my sister and I would have become custodians of its distribution, but as it is..."

"Charles is not a reasonable boy," Sharon continued, her voice as patient as a schoolteacher’s. "He talks about... good works and schools for... for cripples and the disadvantaged... he plans to sink the whole fortune into useless charities! He reads all this... this _philosophy_ and it corrupts his good sense. I can't watch him drive himself to madness and take the family fortune with him. He's fragile, Mr Eisen, and it is a kindness to end... to end it all now, while he's still young," she brushed a quick tear from her eye. "My late husband would have understood. He could never bear to think of Charles living out his days in some miserable hospital once his parents couldn't look after him anymore."

Erik touched a match to the shredded tobacco in the bowl of the pipe and breathed in until the leaves began to glow. He blew a long plume of smoke out of his nostrils. At last, after the silence had dragged on so long that Mrs Marko had begun to tremble, he spoke.

"Here's what's going to happen," he said. "On Sunday, while the servants are all at church - but not you two, you're going to stay at home because Charles is looking poorly - you're going to go upstairs and find Charles having a fit. Or breathing problems, whatever his doctors are more likely to believe, you know his health better than I do."

Mr Marko blinked, "Do you have the drugs to make that happen?"

Erik gritted his teeth, "He's not _really_ going to have a fit, you idiot, this is just what you're going to tell the doctors."

"Oh! Sorry. Go on."

Erik took another puff of his pipe. "An ambulance is going to arrive at the door. I'll be driving it. I'll take Charles straight to the hospital. By the time he gets there, he will be unresponsive. The doctors will not be able to revive him," he swept his hand through the door. "It'll be peaceful and painless."

Mrs Marko gave a soft sob and blew her nose in her handkerchief. Mr Marko put his arm around her and nodded. "We understand. I'll give you a quarter of your fee today, and the rest after the funeral."

Later, while Erik was retrieving his hat and coat, he heard Mrs Marko openly sobbing in the next room.

It would not, he thought to himself as he tipped his hat to the maid holding the door for him, be enough to save her. 

\---

The ambulance, a horse-drawn buggy with a covered cabin - usually stocked with surgical equipment and bottles of tinctures and chemicals, but today empty - had been easy to acquire. Erik had a contact in St John's who had escaped heavy debts thanks to Erik’s handiwork. He'd owed a gambling mogul more than his family’s life was worth, but after Erik strangled the mogul in his sleep, all the debts disappeared into the legal loopholes they’d come from. Good job, that had been. Paid for by a collective of local business owners sick of their employees being dragged into the rigged dice games. Erik had made a lot of friends that day - and enemies, but he was pretty sure he was starting to saturate the market in enemies. 

Although he was based in London and regularly took work across France, Prussia and Spain, the city of Chester was out of his way. He didn't know the territory and he'd been lucky to find the St John's contact. But for what he had planned, all that was a good thing. No one to recognise him out here. No one to remember him once he was gone. 

Mrs Marko opened the door for him. She was dressed for church in a modest oak-green gown, and wearing only a bare powder and a little rouge today. It did not cover the grey shadows around her eyes and mouth. She didn't say anything as she hurried him inside and directed him to her son's door. For a moment Erik thought she was honestly going to leave him there and flee, but as he barged in she took a breath and followed him.

Charles Xavier was sitting at his writing desk, his hand poised above an empty letter sheet. His pen did not even look as if it had been inked. When he raised his head, Erik found his feet halting of their own accord. Charles Xavier’s face was relatively plain – a smooth oval, beard trimmed fashionably short, eyes a cutting blue – but it felt indubitably as if he was looking not at Erik, but _into_ him. Erik felt a small breath leave his throat. It was as if that gaze was filling him, pushing out the space his lungs needed, and would swill inside his torso for a long time after the man turned his eyes away. Erik thought, _this man is ALIVE_. 

Charles put down his pen and wheeled his chair around. “Mother, what is this?”

“This man’s from St John’s, darling,” Mrs Marko said. Her voice was strained and Erik thought regretfully that he should never trust civilians to be actors. “He’s going to take you down to the hospital to get you checked.”

“I feel fine,” Charles said in exasperation. “Why can’t Doctor Walter make a house call?”

“On a Sunday?” Mrs Marko clasped her hands together. “Please, Charles, you looked dreadful this morning. Do as you’re told for once, my chook.”

Charles made an unpleasant face as if he’d bitten a dandelion, but smoothed it quickly as he glanced at Erik. He began to button up his waistcoat. “Very well. Let me get my coat and the book.”

He wheeled himself swiftly to open the wardrobe – the hooks all lowered so that he could reach them from his chair – and took a few moments choosing a jacket of dark blue wool, which he draped over his lap. He reached deeper into the shelf of the wardrobe and pulled out a large black bible, which he placed reverently on top of the coat. Then he turned around to face Erik. “I’m ready, sir.”

He seemed to be waiting for something, and Erik remembered how many stairs he’d come up on his way. He wondered why the Markos didn’t give Charles a room on the ground floor; it would surely cost less than their weekly chardonnay budget to install a ramp so that he could get outside without difficulty. But given everything he’d seen of them so far, perhaps they did not like the idea of losing even that soupçon of control over their adult ward. 

He crossed the room and bent to scoop Charles up, the coat and bible still cradled in the man’s lap. Strong arms curled around Erik’s neck and he could feel the beat of Charles’ heart even through two shirts and the undergarments between them. 

Charles did not look at Erik’s face as he was carried to the door. He called back, “Can you summon Dilby to bring my chair please, Mother.”

“He’s at church. And you won’t need it, my chook, they’ve got chairs at the hospital.”

“Then can you bring it. _Please_ , Mother.”

 _Well,_ Erik thought, _that will make things easier once this is over_.

With some difficulty, Mrs Marko carried the chair out to the ambulance. As Erik headed for the back, Charles said sweetly, “May I sit up the front with you, please? I like to see where we’re going.”

“You might fall off,” Erik said. The roads weren’t always smooth, and he had enough trouble driving a carriage when he was able to brace himself with his legs.

“I won’t,” Charles said, with a quickly disguised tinge of annoyance. Erik shrugged and took him to the front. 

Once Charles was seated he slipped on his coat and gloves and sat clutching his bible between his hands, still avoiding Erik’s eye. Erik strode over to Mrs Marko, who was standing in the doorway with her hand to her mouth. “Sorry to be a bother madam, you mind if I use your facilities before I leave?”

She jumped as if he’d blasted a trumpet in her ear, but nodded and showed him to the servant’s bathroom in the back. When he returned, Charles was sitting in the exact same position Erik had left him, still staring straight ahead. Erik checked the horses’ harnesses, climbed up beside him, and then they were off. 

After about half a mile they had left the elegant mansions and tall hedges behind and Chester was bustling around them. Though the shops were shut up for the Sabbath, there were women carrying packages, small children running after their older siblings, and the occasional tradesman or coal seller hurrying carts of goods around the slower ambulance. 

Neither of them had exchanged a word until Charles said, quite suddenly, “Have my parents hired you to kill me, or just deliver me to my death?”

Erik nodded thoughtfully to himself. “You’re a smart boy.”

“I’m not a boy. And I simply have to be other than an idiot to see what they’ve been planning since I turned my cousin Raven down.”

“I thought she turned _you_ down?”

“We both agreed on that story, obviously, for the sake of her future prospects.”

Erik flicked the reigns to hurry the horses a little. “They hired me to kill you.”

“I see,” Charles said softly. He was looking out at the street. Between the rows, the river could be seen glinting in the morning sunlight. “May I please pray first?”

“You may do whatever you like,” Erik replied. 

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Charles bow his head and heard the rustle of the pages. There was a sudden, graceless movement that made him think the man had thrown himself off the seat onto the road, but he turned to find them face-to-face, eyes inches apart just as the tip of the blade jabbed into his side, under the edge of his short coat.

The bible tumbled off the ambulance, and the hollowed-out pages in the perfect shape of a dagger fluttered open before it was lost under the vehicle’s muddy wheels.

Charles had one arm thrown forward, resting on Erik’s leg, in order to hide the knife from passersby. Erik could feel that hand trembling. This man wasn’t a killer by anyone’s standards, but Erik knew from experience that people did all sorts of uncharacteristic things when their life was in danger. 

“Take us right at the next crossing way,” Charles said. “If you don’t, I’ll scream that I’m being kidnapped.”

“Why haven’t you already?” Erik asked conversationally. He twitched his finger and felt the metal in the knife respond. Good. He was in no danger.

“There’s a chance they’ll take me back to my parents,” Charles replied, “but I’ll risk that if you don’t obey. We’re going to my cousin’s. Then you’re free to go.”

Erik sighed. “I really think I should take you to the hospital.”

“Do you think I’m mad?”

“No,” Erik said patiently, “but I think it will give you a better alibi.”

Charles’ eyebrows tightened. Erik called for the horses to stop, and they clattered to a halt. He glanced back at the city, and Charles followed his gaze.

There was a huge, black plume of smoke rising to mingle into the clouds above. A few people on the street were turning to look. The pressure of the knife lessened; Charles’ mouth was hanging open.

Erik rumbled, “I kill who I want to kill. I can refund the contract money to you if you feel I’ve cheated your parents. I doubt they’re troubled by such things by now.”

Charles pulled away, pointing the knife heedlessly over the rooftops towards the smoke. “Back, take us back!”

“The hospital would really raise fewer questions—“

_“Now!”_

\---

Two hand-pump fire engines had arrived by the time the inferno came into sight, but the fire fighters couldn’t do anything except try to keep the flames from reaching the neighbouring houses. The air tasted of seared paint and plaster, and bells were ringing up and down the octaves, from the engines and the nearby churches to a few servants running up and down the street calling for an evacuation. Charles gave a wretched, half-stifled cry of horror and fumbled to lower himself off the ambulance; the maid who had held the door for Erik had dashed up and pulled his chair onto the ground for him.

“Were they inside? Who was inside?” he begged, trying to wheel himself on the uneven cobbles. The maid steadied the chair and gripped the back of it tight to keep him from approaching the burning mansion. He turned his face towards the flames, orange lights flickering in his eyes, “Mother!”

“I’m sorry sir,” she said, “we all rushed back from church when we ‘eard the bells, sir, but no one’s seen Mr or Mrs Marko at all. Maybe they made it out, sir, maybe they’ve been taken to the ‘ospital already. Oh, please stop trying to get closer, sir, there’s nothing you can do!”

Charles threw a look of unreserved fury over his shoulder at Erik. “Get out of my sight.”

The maid looked between them in confusion. Erik was lighting his pipe. “I have to return the ambulance, Mr Xavier, so I’ll bid you good day,” he nodded at the maid. “I hope I’ve been of service.”

Charles said nothing. Erik gave him a quick bow, “I expect you’ve got a lot of finances to work out. A lot of charities. School for the crippled, I hear. Anyway,” he straitened up. “If you need me in future, you can find me in London. There’s a pub on Yahalom Street, name of the Medeba. Ask the proprietor for Erik Lensherr and he’ll see that I get the message.”

He tipped his hat to the maid once more, turned and walked away until the smoke gushing across the street swallowed him up.


	3. a pillow for his head

A month passed. In London, Erik lived in a two-story townhouse he rented at half what it was worth because he'd helped the landlord out some years ago. But now he was stuck in the dredges of inactivity. He had followed up the Chester job precisely because there was no one in the city or abroad seeking his skills. Stagnating in the house was unbearable, so he visited the pubs and the opium dens, half-hoping that some wretched criminal would recognise him and start a fight. He needed a good fight.

He wasn't trying to think of the blue-eyed Xavier, but the memory of that last hateful expression on the man's features haunted him. He had never cared about the victims of his kills. They always deserved it. That was the only rule he followed. Charles was not supposed to be the victim, but he had been angry. Erik found himself, despite all attempts to brush it off, annoyed and hurt at his lack of gratitude.

But he didn't send any message to Chester, and did not expect to see Charles again.

It was early one Tuesday when Erik heard the doorbell. He was lounging upstairs, reading the papers he ordered from Germany, and he sat bolt upright at the cheery ding. His mind quickly ran through the innocent possibilities - mail already arrived, grocer doesn't come until afternoon, deliveries not due - and hurried out to lean over the banister. Edie was already pulling the door open; Erik took the stairs three at a time, but was too late to stop her. 

There was no one on the doorstep. Edie trotted up to the threshold, peering out into the street. Erik saw her raise her hand to greet someone. "Good morning!"

"Good morning," a voice replied. "Does a Mr Lensherr reside here?"

"Oh, yes," Edie glanced back to him. "Erik, come along."

Erik leaned out the doorway. The house stood above a short flight of stairs, and Charles Xavier sat on the pavement at the bottom, a large brown suitcase resting beside him. He must have just emerged from a carriage, because the curls of hair beneath his hat were still locked in tight whorls. Erik could not help admiring his tailor’s handiwork, though he knew all Charles’ clothes must be younger than a month in age: the rest were ashes. The short-breasted, sandy-grey coat was all sharp corners and smooth stretches of silk, shamelessly flaunting the strength in his shoulders, while the lower half of his suit avoided emphasising his atrophied legs by bucking the current fashion for tight trousers. The loosely knotted necktie under his high collar was a creamy brown that looked as if it had been arranged against his throat at a portrait sitting – or perhaps had already been crafted with a few masterful strokes of oil paint. 

"What are you doing here?" Erik asked, more curious than antagonistic.

"I need somewhere to stay in London," Charles called up. "May I come in?"

"Of course you may, of course," Edie rapped Erik's arm with the back of her hand. "Go and get him, Erik, I shall bring his things. Hurry up, it's cold out there."

Erik meandered down the steps and manoeuvred Charles into his arms, as he had back at the Marko house. It felt considerably more uncomfortable this time around, and Charles did not speak until they were inside and sitting down again – Edie was as sturdy as she had ever been and carried both his chair and case with no trouble. 

"Mr Xavier, this is my... housekeeper," Erik said stiffly, gesturing to Edie.

"Your housekeeper? You absurd boy. I'm his mother," she said bluntly as she took Charles' hat and outer coat and hung them by the door. "It is lovely to meet a friend of Erik's."

"Charles Xavier, at your service," Charles smiled. "And we're more acquaintances, but... ah, thank you," he said, as Edie overrode him with an invitation into the lounge for morning tea. 

While she was sweeping around the kitchen preparing goodness-knew-what, Charles transferred himself to the couch. Erik leaned over him, resting his knuckles on the arm beside Charles. "How do you find this house?" he hissed. "Did my man at the Medeba Pub let it slip? Did you bribe him?"

"No! His loyalty is not compromised," Charles said quickly. "I simply... I find myself good at knowing things, of late," without elaborating he went on. “Don’t you wish to know why I’m here?”

“I expect you’re about to tell me.”

“You are quite correct,” Charles leaned into the sofa, stretching his arms along the back. "My stepbrother, Mr Cain Marko, is challenging me for my father's inheritance. He's taken it all the way to the courts, and I fear have a long fight on my hands. But there's no one I can trust yet and I need new advisers, not my mother's odious lawyers – they were all in the back pocket of my stepfather. Cain's cut my stipend down to almost nothing. He's hoping to force me into settling for scraps, but I won't," Charles' cheeks pinked. "I shan’t!”

“I can’t help you with this,” Erik stepped back from the sofa, pacing to the window before he turned back to look at Charles. He tucked his hands into his pockets. “Unless you’re looking to purchase my services.”

“No thank you,” Charles said disdainfully. “I request that you give me lodging, since you put me in this situation in the first place."

"Put you in this situation?" Erik gasped, throwing his shoulders back. "I saved your life!"

"You killed my mother!" Charles burst out, just as Edie arrived with a tray of coffee and cakes. 

She froze, and then carefully put the tray down on the table. In German she said in a brittle voice, " _You killed his mother?_ "

" _Eema, don't let's talk about this now--_ "

" _No, boy! You promised me you would never harm the innocent!_ " Edie crossed her arms.

" _His mother was not innocent! If you knew--_ "

Charles cut in, in near-perfect German, " _It was very complicated, gnädige frau. He was protecting me._ "

Edie drew in a long breath through her nostrils. She turned cold eyes on Erik, returning to English. "He may stay as long as he wants."

"Mama," Erik spread his arms, this time switching all the way into Sinti-Manouche; let the blue-blooded Xavier try and decipher an obscure Romani tongue like that. "|He should not even know I live here!|"

"Bah. You are so paranoid. I thought I had taught you better hospitality," Edie sat on the armchair opposite Charles, tucking her skirts away. "Please, Mr Xavier, do you take sugar with your coffee?"

\---

Charles lay awake listening to Edie patter about winding the clocks and closing the flumes over the cooling hearths. When he concentrated hard, he could hear the muttering of her mind, mostly in German and what he thought might be flashes of Hebrew. There was a feather-light warmth in her skull that drew him in, and he snatched back his consciousness before he could intrude on her deeper thoughts and memories. As he did so, he caught a flash of all the minds within a few hundred yards, like scattered saplings of every variety lit up by a flash of lightning. The children dreaming next door, the old street-cleaner patting his cat in the basement down the way, the sisters practicing the harpiscord by candlelight. And just upstairs, the sharp silhouette of Erik’s mind – Charles jerked away, comforting himself with Edie’s presence on his periphery.

She had been tremendously kind to him, offering him home-cooked delicacies and insisting on unpacking his bag from him so that she could see if there was anything he was missing. She had laid out fresh towels and a cube of rough-cut, softly perfumed soap in the small washhouse. The only downstairs bedroom was the disused maid’s quarters, but it was spacious enough for his chair and he appreciated that Edie had immediately known he would prefer it to the grand guestroom upstairs, where he would have been incapable of even answering the door without assistance. 

But then she had tentatively held up the chamber pot that sat under the bed, asking, “Will you be able to…?”

“Ah, yes,” he said quickly. “Yes, I’m fine.”

She had been nothing but kind. But the longer he lived, the more he felt like kindness would be the very poison that killed him.

 _Don’t think about that,_ he scolded himself, turning his head to the side and squeezing his eyes shut. He had to believe that that was all mother had wanted; to put him out of the misery she had so blindly perceived. She couldn’t really have been doing it for Father’s money. She had pitied her son, but she’d loved him. She _had_ to have loved him. 

Cousin Raven loved him, he was sure of that. He’d been sure of it before the fire, but afterwards, when her thoughts began to bleed into his and he wondered if this was what it felt like to go mad in a good Shakespeare, he’d been more sure than ever. But this miraculous gift, these cursed abilities, had come too late to look for love in Mother’s mind.

The house was no longer creaking with Edie’s footsteps. Charles practiced his German to keep himself awake until he was sure everyone else was asleep. Then he propped himself up, pulled his chair close to the bed and picked up one of Edie’s cotton-linen pillows. 

\---

Erik’s eyes opened and he sat up like a well-oiled machine. Sometimes he awoke with nightmares, but not tonight. Something needed attention. He got up, slipping on a cotton robe that sat over the only chair in his Spartan bedroom. He padded through the rectangles of moonlight the window had painted across the floor. He opened the door quickly, ready to deflect any buckshot or block any punch that came his way. But the hallway was empty. He walked past Edie’s room in the near-total darkness, pausing to sense the shifting depression of her weight on the springs, until he got to the stairwell.

Ah. There was the disturbance. On the top step sat Charles, his head bowed and a pillow resting on his lap. For a moment Erik thought, _he’s been sleepwalking_ , but then – obviously not.

“Evening,” Charles said, he sounded fatigued, but very awake. 

“How did you get up here?”

“One learns to find one’s own way.”

After a short silence, Erik lowered himself onto the step beside him. He pointed at the pillow. “Planning to take the good room after all?”

“Actually, I was planning to smother you in your sleep,” Charles said. It was clear that he was very serious. “That’s why I really came here. For justice. But I got up here and I… couldn’t.”

“Of course not,” Erik rumbled. “I have very good reflexes.”

“You know what I mean, Mr Lensherr.”

Erik nodded, glancing down the slope of the stairwell’s ceiling. Charles chair sat at the bottom like a loyal hound. 

“I’ll leave tomorrow. I’m sure I can find a boarding house cheap enough,” Charles murmured. It wasn’t just fatigue in his voice. Erik recognised the hollowness, the loss – it sounded like his mother’s voice, when she’d whispered stories to him in the inns and cellars where they’d slept during their great upheaval, crossing Europe after Erik’s father had died. He remembered being a small child and afraid he wasn’t enough for her, and how long it had taken him to understand that he was what kept her going. But he also remembered how the two of them had grown up fast that year, grown out into the world together, and become stronger and closer to G-d in the process. That was what he wanted for Charles, that was the process he had expected to see after the fire. But he couldn’t yet detect it taking root. Time, that was what Charles needed now. And room to grow.

“No,” Erik said in answer, a little too fast and demanding. He tried to think of how Edie would have spoken. “You’re welcome here. I already enjoy your company.”

Charles raised his head at last. “Don’t tease me. After all you’ve done.”

“I mean it. I’m just trying to be—”

“Don’t say kind. Don’t say helpful,” Charles closed his eyes.

“-friendly. Which is rare for me,” Erik stood up, hunching over to slap Charles on the shoulder. “Let me take you down to your chair. You have lawyers to talk to tomorrow, you need to sleep and be at your best.”

Charles’ head came to rest on Erik’s shoulder and his eyes half-closed as Erik carried him down the stairs. Erik thought, _I know your best is still to come._

“You know nothing,” Charles breathed against his collarbone. Erik paused for a fraction of a second, as if catching his balance on the edge of the stair, and then continued without reply.


	4. smoke and murder

It was a rare day of clear skies in London. A few sparrows pecked at the bare dirt. Charles was out in the tiny yard that Erik’s house shared with the surrounding building. He steadied his pistol with both hands, taking a deep breath until the only discernable movement in his whole body was the muffled thrum of his heart. His finger eased the trigger back, feeling the flint strain to be released. He increased the tension until the lock released and the powder ignited. The force threw his hands back. The sparrows scattered, tweeting madly. Against the brick wall at the other end of the yard, Charles saw a burst of red powder, a few feet to the left of the chalk cross he’d been aiming for. 

“Good,” Erik said from where he was leaning against the doorframe of Edie’s kitchen, his hat low over his face to keep the sun out. “Very good for an old pistol like this. Try loading it by yourself.”

He had knocked together a wooden ramp out the kitchen door, and there was a gated alley that ran along the side of the house and opened on the street. He had even given Charles a key so he could come and go as he pleased. In this cramped little yard with its narrow houses and tiny windows, Charles was more free than he had ever been in his life. 

“Are you sure your neighbours aren’t going to complain about the noise?” he asked Erik. 

“They’re accustomed to it. I put all my new guns through their paces out here.”

While Charles was refilling the powder and stuffing a fresh bullet down the barrel, Erik crouched by his chair, running his hand between the wheels and the armrest. “I can adjust these,” he said, “design quick-release breaks. And we’ll put a holster here,” he slid his hand over the armrest, “between your leg and the wheel – on the left side, it’ll be easier to reach across I think. No one will see the pistol until you draw it. I’ll find you one of my smaller percussion-cap models, much easier to cock. Maybe one of the Correvon nine-millimetres.”

Charles stared at him until he raised his head. “Why, Mr Lehnsherr, would I need to carry a weapon?” he raised an eyebrow. “I hardly think even Cain will send assassins after me.”

“It will be safer, living with me,” Erik said, standing up and dusting his hands. “Edie and I had to find new lodgings twice last year.”

“My God. Does she mind?”

“She was the one who taught me to shoot,” that didn’t really answer the question, but Charles didn’t think he’d get a better answer. Erik held out his hand for the pistol, and he passed it over. He checked it was loaded correctly. “Good. You shouldn’t blow your hand off,” he placed it back in Charles’ grasp and leaned over him. Charles shivered as Erik’s hands smoothed out the creases of his shirtsleeves. He was speaking close to Charles’ ear, very low, his palms two oases of warmth on Charles’ biceps. “Relax your shoulders. Keep the fingers of your left hand splayed. When you try the Correvon you’ll just be using that hand to cock it. Ready?”

Charles nodded. 

“Take your time.”

He fired. He was sure the bullet hit much closer to the centre this time. 

\---

It had been both the most difficult and the most wonderful three weeks of Charles’ life. He had spent most of the days talking to lawyers, and where possible, going through files on Kurt Marko’s management of the businesses his father had left in trust, while trying to untangle the web of legal traps with which Marko had primed the ownership of his father’s assets. Once upon a time everything had been set up with the simplest of premises: once Charles turned twenty-five, all the businesses and properties were in his name. But Marko had transferred debts and rearranged leases and tied up a huge part of the supposedly liquid fortune – and probably even more than Charles had discovered so far – into factories and investments and real estate deals. Cain was not just trying to get his hands on the ready cash. Charles was pretty sure he was genuinely terrified that his father’s meddling had made most of the Xavier estate inaccessible to _anyone_. 

So it was painful and difficult and very often boring work – but it was also real life, his life, and there was no one looking over his shoulder or keeping him out of the loop or telling him he looked poorly. And afterwards, when he was ready to tear out his hair or scream at Cain’s infernal lawyers and their nauseating babble, he came home to a warm fire and Edie’s hearty, foreign meals, and perhaps a game of chess with Erik or just a long evening of all three of them sitting by the fire. 

Erik was out more evenings than he in, but Charles lived for the latter. Occasionally Charles would read aloud some titbit of this-or-that from the ancient books of poetry in the house, or the evening newspaper. Sometimes Edie would pick up her steel crochet needles to click-click-click away like the house’s heart beating. But mostly the silences were what made Charles feel like he had fallen into a perfect dream. 

But he knew that in the end, real life always comes calling.

\---

The first time Charles realised anything was wrong was on one of the days when he stayed around the house. He was going through account books he’d taken from one of the businesses Kurt had done a particularly good job of meddling with. The kitchen was the room next to his bedroom, but he didn’t hear the knocking at the back door. He was only aware of it when the staccato of a knife chopping parsnips stopped suddenly. There were a brief two minutes of muffled conversation, but then the sound of the door closing and Edie’s footsteps across the kitchen. The slicing of parsnips, however, did not resume.

Charles’ mind had been concentrating deeply on the columns of figures a moment ago, but now it was wandering freely. He had never heard anyone come to the rear door; it could not be reached except through the locked alley, and only the tenants of the surrounding houses had a key. He knew he couldn’t do sums until he solved the mystery. He laid his pencil aside and wheeled himself along the hall to the kitchen doorway.

Edie was sitting on a stool beside the old table, her hands lying in the pillow of her apron. She stared at the smog-greyed sunbeams that stretched through the lattice windows. Charles had never seen her face so expressionless. He raised two fingers to his temple – he had found this aided his gift, for no reason he could discern – and then dropped them again. No, no he wouldn’t be a spy on the minds of his friends. He cleared his throat.

Edie’s head swivelled to look at him. He inched himself through the doorway, “Are you alright, dear?”

“Yes I am, Mr Xavier,” Edie got to her feet, massaging her back. “Merely resting for a moment.”

Charles watched her pick up the big vegetable knife and begin slicing the rest of the parsnips she had on the board. She was pretending he was not still in the doorway, and the rhythm of her movements did not have her usual grace. Within moments, she gave a sharp curse in a language Charles didn’t recognise – swearing had not been on his childhood curriculum, which Erik was doing his best to remedy – and rushed to hold her bleeding thumb over the sink.

Charles hurried over. “Here, please, it’s clean-” he held out his handkerchief, “-is it bad? I’ll fetch a bandage—”

“It’s a tiny cut, you fusspot,” Edie insisted, wrapping the handkerchief around the wound and tying it off one-handed. “My damnable son, he sharpens the knives too much, it drives me mad, as if I couldn’t throw a blunt one just as well if I needed to!”

“Of course,” Charles said, shaking his head with a small smile. “But you’re troubled, Edie. Who was at the door? I want to help.”

Edie grumbled, leaning against the bench and elevating her wounded hand and cupping her elbow. “It was our landlord, Mr Xavier. Erik seems to have neglected to pay our rent this week. And last week. And the week before.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Charles cried at once. “I’ll go and find my chequebook, I should have been paying my lodgings from the beginning. I’ll clear the debt at once, I’m sure I owe much more than that anyway.”

“Oh, stop, stop!” Edie raised her hand and winced. “We can discuss a boarder’s fee later, my boy. That is not my worry,” she let out a long sigh. “Erik has not told me anything about a problem with the finances, and he let me spend all that money on a roast last week, too. He’s hiding something,” she shook her head, closing her eyes and pressing her hand to her brow. “And he hasn’t taken a job since Chester, though I know he’s had offers.”

Charles’ mind made him skip over the mention of Chester and latch onto Edie’s concern. “But he goes out every other night, and sometimes he’s not back until near dawn,” Charles knew this because he checked with a quick mental scan of the house whenever he drifted in and out of sleep, often unable to settle properly until he knew Edie and Erik were both home safe. “Where is he going, if not to… find work?”

Edie let out a long, heavy breath, her hand still over her face and her eyes avoiding Charles’ gaze. At last she said with great reluctance, “I caught him three nights ago coming home late. He smelled of madak,” she waved her hand vaguely. “Opium mix. He has good friends who are Chinamen, you know, and he used to smoke it at home sometimes, but I think…” she shook her head again. “I’ve no certainty, these are an old woman’s fears.”

Charles found it difficult to formulate a response. He took Edie’s gnarled hand, smelling the parsnip on her, and finally said, “You know him best. If you are concerned, there is reason for concern. I’ll talk to him—“

“No, no, he must sort himself out. You know how he sulks if he thinks I’m trying to coddle him,” she pulled out of Charles’ grasp and went back to the vegetable board, picking up the long knife and deftly splitting the next parsnip. “Forget my nerves, Mr Xavier, you already have your legal wrangles to worry your mind. Erik will straighten himself out.”

Charles promised to do as she said, but when he got back to his account books he couldn’t concentrate at all. He spent the rest of the day in a haze of disjointed thoughts and plans, trying to think of a way to help that wouldn’t compromise the stubborn pride of either Lehnsherr. But if even Edie wasn’t sure what was going on, how was Charles to do anything?

By the time he went to bed without having seen a trace of Erik all day, Charles’ resolution had solidified. At the very least, he had to clear up the mystery, even if there was no easy solution to it. He waited until Edie wouldn’t see the glow under his door and then sat up in bed reading by candlelight. Midnight came and went and he could feel only the soft ebb and flow of Edie’s sleeping thoughts. He pinched his arm when he felt himself nodding off. And then, just when he thought he could hold his eyes open no longer, he heard the click of the front door.

Charls blew out the candle, though it was unlikely Erik would see it unless he came down to this end of the house. He put his book aside and lay down. Erik’s mind was present, but it felt blurred. He couldn’t make out anything clearly. Perhaps Charles was simply sleepy. He listened to the floorboards creaking above him and then the settling of the ceiling beams as Erik lay down. He took a breath, said a quick, apologetic prayer in case this was a form of witchcraft, and put two fingers to his temple.

At once, he saw the minds around him clearly, all of them singing and breathing and stuttering in their sleep. He turned his tendrils away from them and sought out one mind only. It felt like a slog through a flooded march. Erik’s mind was a dense fog of sensation, a weightless but strangling bliss. 

Charles did not clearly remember the incident that put him in the chair, nor his long stay in the hospital afterwards. But the fog was nevertheless familiar, and his gift could act upon his own memories too; what Erik was feeling was a close match to the sweet haze of laudanum that he’d been fed after the injury. There was no doubt that Erik had been partaking in the opium pipe tonight.

Having already crossed at least one of his own lines tonight, curiosity got the better of Charles. Telling himself it was simply to learn how long this had been going on and how serious Erik’s financial troubles were, he pushed through the fog to reach the core of Erik’s mind beyond. Gently, still unsure whether others could detect his intrusion, Charles brushed against the cache of Erik’s memories.

At once he found himself falling into a pit, into the grave of a titan, and memories like black birds filled the air, pecking and shrieking and slashing. _Fire – blood – father murdered – they hurt Mama – flee – no more home – no more safe – don’t blame God – blame man – blame man – blame them all -_

Charles could not find up nor down, could not find the light, there was only the birds. He felt the pain of walking for days, of his feet bleeding until the ants came in black streams while he slept. He felt his knife dig deep into a man’s throat, a bad man but a living man, and the terrible discovery that his hunger for justice was not satiated afterwards. He felt the joy the first time he could come home and give his mother more money than she had ever held in her hands before, and the nagging fear that she did not approve, that her love for him had died with all the men he’d killed. 

Desperate, lost and stretched as the birds that were tearing holes right through him, Charles searched for his own brain and up rose new memories. Like looking in the devil’s mirror Charles saw himself on the doorstep, and sitting in front of the fire, and wrapping up in one of Erik’s scarves before he left the house. He felt the strangest fire rise up, an intense need that had been bullied away and pushed so deep he knew Erik was barely aware of it. Finally, in shame and confusion, Charles broke free.

With a gasp he rolled onto his side, his throat gagging and the room spinning around him. His paralysed legs spasmed. He had never imagined that one life could be stretched so thin over so much pain. He clutched his head, his dizziness transforming into a sharp headache. These abilities… whatever they were, he was not ready to control their full potential. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He could hear Erik’s bed creaking above and pulled the blankets up over his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He was so ashamed. How could he think he had the right to step into someone else’s memories? How dare he? And to a friend…

Covering his mouth to repress a sob of shame, Charles forced himself to look at what he’d discovered. Edie had been right to think her son was in trouble. Erik had doubled his trips to the opium dens in the last month alone. He was not well, and Charles didn’t think he would, as Edie had insisted, ‘straighten himself out’. 

Not without someone’s help, anyway.

\---

Thursday was the first day of mediation between Charles’ lawyers and Cain’s.

Charles came home with rain down the back of his collar and his wheels choked with mud. When he took off his soaked gloves, his hands were so cold it took him minutes to unhook the buttons of his coat and peel it off. He tried to get it up onto the stand in the hallway as he usually did, with a skilled toss. But today the coat didn’t catch, and the heavy, wet folds slumped to the floor. 

“Damn it!” Charles bellowed, slamming his fist into the wall. He felt Edie’s surprise from somewhere upstairs and buried his face in his hands, wishing that she hadn’t been home. He sucked in two long, heaving breaths and felt his heart rate begin to slow by the time she appeared in the doorway.

“Mr Xavier!” Edie hurried forward to fetch the coat and hang it up for him. She threw the dishcloth she was carrying over her shoulder. “Are you ill?”

“I’m perfectly well, Mrs Lehnsherr,” Charles said in a crafted, patient voice. He raised his head and smiled at her. “I think I’ll retire for the evening.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some supper first?”

“No, Mrs Lehnsherr,” Charles turned his chair around and headed for his room. 

“Mr Xavier,” Edie called after him. “Wait, please!”

Charles stared straight ahead, reaching for the door handle. “I’m busy, Mrs Lehnsherr. I have to… write a letter.”

“It’s Erik,” Edie said. 

Charles froze, his hand on the cool metal knob. His guard slipped and he felt Edie’s mind pulsing like a heart struggling against blood that was mixed with tar. He turned his head and saw her wringing the dishcloth between her hands. 

“He went out to meet a potential client at lunch,” Edie said breathlessly. “He isn’t home. I know I shouldn’t worry, but he… he wanted so much to be waiting for you after the lawyers’ mediation. It’s not like him to break promises to himself.”

Charles swivelled his chair back around. “Do you know where he went?”

“The Medeba Pub. But I went down there this afternoon. The barman said he left about one,” Edie shook her head. 

“I’ll find him,” Charles said at once. “If you’ll lend me a brolly,” he glanced at the nearest window, where the tail end of the rain tapped pitifully.

“Are you going to call someone?” Edie took a couple of steps forward, and Charles remembered her comment about throwing a knife if she needed to. “Erik and the police have never been firm friends, you see…”

“I understand. But I’ll find him myself, trust me.”

He could see – and sense – that she didn’t, but she wasn’t _his_ mother. She helped him back into his coat and offered him the large black umbrella that Erik often took on his errands. While she was fetching it, Charles went into his room, took the little pistol Erik had given him, loaded it and slipped it into the holster by his leg. He wasn’t convinced by Erik’s claim that no one would see it because they did not expect it to be there; it looked horribly visible from where he sat. He took the blanket off his bed and covered his legs, folding the edges so that the gun was better hidden.

Charles made his way to the end of the alley and settled with the umbrella overhead. He looked out into the grey street, almost empty apart from a bedraggled dog and a youth dashing from awning to awning with a newspaper held over his head. He closed his eyes, took in a deep breath, and placed two fingers to his temple. 

\---

He thought he'd never find a carriage in this weather. The Lehnsherrs' neighbourhood always had a dearth of them anyway, but when everyone was trying to avoid the rain it would be even worse. He made slow progress with his hands cramping from the cold and most of his brain focused on filtering the distant, exceedingly faint trace of Erik's mind from the rest of the masses, but finally he hit a stroke of luck when he reached a busier area. A carriage stopped at the edge of the road and the passenger slid down the window to hail Charles.

"Where are you headed, sir?"

"North-west. The market district by the Thames, I think," Charles replied. 

The man looked faintly alarmed at this dodgy destination. He was a pale, skinny fellow with a wispy moustache, but Charles didn't sense any maliciousness from his mind. "What errand have you there?"

"A friend in need," Charles explained. "Possibly in great need, if you'll pardon me, so I really should go-”

"No, wait!" The passenger reached out to unlatch the door. "I'll give you a ride, please. I can't stand the thought of you travelling all that way in this dreary downpour, you'll catch your death."

Charles was torn. He hated to accept charity from a stranger's pity, and frankly he had hardier lungs then most of the gentlemen he knew and didn't think a little rain could do him any damage. But it would be a lot faster... and if Erik really was in trouble... maybe he was fine, maybe he was dozing through opium-dreams in some hollow, but Edie had been really, truly worried. That wasn't like her.

The cab driver and his passenger – judging by the size of his hat he was more wealthy than a man so charitable should be – lifted Charles, chair and all, into the carriage. It shouldn’t have fitted but they angled it a bit and it did. The wealthy man was panting from the small exertion. His driver huffed through his moustache and asked Charles for directions.

As they entered the merchant’s neighbourhood, Charles knew they were in the right place. Erik’s mind, muddled and fuzzy at the edges as it had been before, was now unmistakable. Charles felt a rush of relief. He had wondered if he was imagining it all. 

He supposed that he still could be. Reading minds, seeing minds – maybe he was going insane, maybe watching your parents burn inside your childhood home did that to you, or maybe moving in with their murderer was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or maybe it was when you looked at the murderer one day and wanted to—

He didn’t think about that. He focused on honing in on the hum of Erik. 

They went down side streets and navigated labyrinths of empty crates and carts. The stink of the Thames clogged the air and women called from balcony windows, promising him all the sweetness he was looking for if he’d only come up. The rich passenger was growing more and more uncomfortable, and Charles could hear a litany of regret in his thoughts, _what am I doing here why did I stop poor lad just looked so alone it was like I had to like the Lord was nudging me I should be home with Marie and the baby what am I doing here_ -

“Stop,” Charles called to the driver, “It’s here.”

They helped him down and he wheeled himself towards the low awning of a wig store, which was open and lit inside despite the hour being after eight. There were no steps, Charles was relieved to see; he could go on alone from here. He looked back at the passenger and his driver, “Thank you. You can go, if you like.”

“We’re not cowards,” the driver grunted, lighting a thin cigar and settling himself on the front seat beneath Charles’ umbrella. “We’ll be here when yer come back.”

Charles would have tried to dissuade him, or at least suggest they meet a little further away, but at that moment a mental firecracker went off in his periphery. A lurching wave of panic and red rage, broiling somewhere close by.

Erik. 

\---

His thoughts were wordless and still bumbling through the fog of the drug, but like shadows projected by lightning bolts there were the clear shapes of distress. Erik furious, straining against something, trying to call for help and unable to. Charles reached the door of the wig store as fast as he could, bursting through into a warm interior that smelled of a suffocating incense. 

“Good evening, sir,” the clerk said. “Are you looking for a room…?”

“Yes, yes, show me where the rooms are – hurry, please, my friend’s in trouble!”

The clerk’s eyes widened and for a moment Charles heard his mind forming a refusal, but then he ushered Charles to a curtain of wooden beads and into the opium den beyond. 

Beyond that he didn’t need direction. He raced ahead of the clerk, down a passageway, left at a branch, through another curtain and into a dark hall lined with doors. The hall was thin and Charles’ chair knocked a flower stand, sending a stream of stagnant vase water onto the carpet. He needed the third door on the right, which was also the last. Charles shoved it open.

The room was small, but lined with low beds covered by thin mattresses, enough for four or five smokers at once. The threadbare rug was covered in old burns and spills and the faded mural on the wall was a twisted, talentless attempt to portray a nymph in the midst of some carnal act with a tree-god. A foreign man in a green suit, his eyes bloodshot and pupils blown, huddled in the corner next to a pipe, his mouth hanging open. On the second bed from the door was Erik, but he was not alone. A huge, doughy fellow in pinstripes was leaning over him, his hands wrapped around Erik’s neck. 

“You right bastard! Killer! This – is – what – you – get -!”

Erik’s face was purpling even under the faint lamplight. He was scrabbling at the fat man’s arms, the taut fabric of his shoulders and lapels, trying to scratch at his eyes, but a combination of the drugs and the strangulation made it a vain struggle.

Charles found that the little pistol was in his hand and pointing at the fat man’s head.

“Let him go!”

The fat man turned his head sharply towards the door and saw Charles. His eyes squeezed up and his cheeks wobbled as he laughed. “Who the hell is this?”

Erik’s mind was yelling, _shoot him shoot him SHOOT HIM_.

“Get out of here, you legless defect!” the fat man snarled at Charles.

Charles wrinkled his nose. “I really hate your kind,” he said, and fired.

There had been lots of death in the adventure books Raven smuggled to him against his mother’s will, and he’d seen murders in the theatre and read about them in the papers. But somehow he had imagined it would be cleaner. 

\---

Erik was lying on his back, wheezing. The fat man was slumped across him like he was trying to keep warm. His body was still seizing. Bits of his blood and brain had splattered the mural of the nymph, turning her coitus into a blood sacrifice. 

Charles found he was still holding the gun in his shaking hands. His fingers would not unlock from around the handle.

Erik shoved the man’s body to the ground and rolled off the bed. He ended up on his knees, clutching his throat, which was making an unpleasant whistling with every breath. At last, Charles managed to jam the gun back into the holster and approach him.

“Here,” he got one arm around Erik’s side, “Lean on my chair, come on. We have to go.”

The clerk from the storefront met them in the hallway, babbling about calling the police. One look in his mind told Charles he wouldn’t do it. With Erik stumbling, sometimes behind him and sometimes sort of hanging over him with his arms trying to find purchase on Charles’ shoulders, they made it through the maze and the hat store and back onto the street. The carriage was still waiting.

The passenger made a lot of startled exclamations and looked like he might actually swoon, but the driver kept him sensible long enough for them both to help Charles and Erik into the cab before they took off into the night. Edie must have heard the horses stopping outside, because she was opening the door and rushing down the stairs before their feet had even hit the pavement. 

There was a storm of questions, the rising panic from the carriage’s passenger, and Erik’s attempts to collapse at inopportune moments. Charles barely managed to deflect all these obstacles on top of dismissing his helpers and getting Erik and Edie back into the house. But he managed it, and once the door were closed behind him, everything seemed a lot easier, like working after a good meal. Erik could speak only in a breathless whisper, and was still deep in the thrall of the opium pipe, so Edie helped him up to his bed and then came down with a look on her face that told Charles exactly how good she was with a kitchen knife. He didn’t think the look was for him, but he also didn’t really want to find out.

“You tell me all in the morning,” she warned, gripping Charles’ arm tight. “And so help him, my son’ll do the same, if I haven’t skinned him myself by then.”

“Goodnight, Edie,” Charles said faintly. 

“Goodnight, Mr Xavier.”

It was only once he was curled in his nightgown between the cold sheets that he remembered the driver still had Erik’s umbrella. Oh well. It was a small price to pay. Much smaller than the fat man had paid.

Charles closed his eyes and tried to sleep. His ears were still ringing. 

He had thought murder would be cleaner.

He had not thought it would be so easy.


	5. a dangerous game

The morning after his first murder, Charles awoke feeling chirpy. He spent a long time in the bathroom shaving in the mirror that Edie had lowered for him, cutting slow, careful edges into his beard. Perhaps he should grow out his sideburns more; that seemed to be in fashion with the gentry right now, it might give him more credibility in his court case. Even the thought that he shouldn’t _need_ credibility, for he was not supposed to be on trial, didn’t bother him particularly. He tied his cravat perfectly first time and spent a while straining over his shoes until the laces looked just so. 

He had to go through the kitchen to get to the communal areas of the house, but he wheeled in to find Erik sitting at the table in a shirt, a thick scarf and a blanket, hunched over a bowl of soup. He raised his eyes to meet Charles.

“Why aren’t you in the dining room?” Charles asked. 

Erik opened his mouth and made a sort of wheezing squeak. He touched the scarf against his throat and tried again. “Edie won’t let me in,” he explained, which was as much as he could apparently manage because he didn’t go on from there. 

Charles set the kettle on the stove and offered Erik a cup of tea, which was received with a nod. 

“Your case,” Erik gasped suddenly. “How was the first day?”

“Just mediation between our lawyers,” Charles said, avoiding his eye.

“But how did it go?”

Charles pulled the tin of leaves closer and spooned them into a clean teapot. “Cain says that if I don’t settle things his way, he will convince the court that I am an invalid incapable of managing my own affairs. He will have me legally made his ward, and he will have full say over every dollar I spend, every house I occupy, every medical need I accrue. My lawyers warn me it’s possible for him to do this, if he’s clever. If the people he pay are clever, rather.”

He didn’t look over as silence fell between them. Erik finally replied, and Charles smiled, because he said exactly what Charles had known he would say even though he hadn’t read Erik’s mind. “I could just kill him for you. I wouldn’t even charge you.”

“That’s not necessary,” Charles said quickly, filling the pot with boiling water and turning to face Erik. “How do you feel?” he asked, as kindly as he could.

Erik shook his head. When Charles held his gaze, he looked away and rasped, “Humiliated.”

“Why?” Charles frowned.

“Because I had to… because you… I let myself…” he shook his head again and picked up his spoon to attempt the soup.

Charles sat very still, his hands resting on his lap. He felt as if he was boiling over, distantly. Finally he asked, “Is my weakness really that detestable?”

Erik raised his head sharply, and his hand went to his throat again as he winced. “That’s not what I meant!” he croaked. “I’d feel the same if Edie had been the one to save me.”

“Yes, but she’s a woman, of course you’d be humiliated,” Charles felt a flush rise in his cheeks. He grabbed his chair and set himself on a course of the door. “Make your own damn tea, since I’m so incapable.”

“Charles!” Erik got up in a rush as he went past, knocking the table so badly that his bowl wobbled and soup slopped over the edge. He stumbled around Charles to block the door, and knelt down, grasping the armrests of the chair. “I am humiliated because of what I am, not because of you – because of what you’ve seen of me-” his face contracted as if in great pain and he laid his head on Charles’ lap. It was the strangest thing Charles had ever experienced, almost religious in its lack of reservation, and Charles tentatively combed his fingers through that thick, slightly oily hair, feeling the faint bumps and ridges of Erik’s skull. “I only wanted to do justice but there’s always more work to be done and sometimes I feel so small doing it that I start to think maybe it’s worthless-”

Charles asked quietly, “Do you think it’s worthless? Now, I mean, not with an opium pipe in front of you.”

“No. Perhaps,” Erik closed his eyes like a child pretending he didn’t have to do his sums if he couldn’t see them. 

“Do you think what you did to my parents was worthless? Do you think it would be worthless if you killed Cain for me?”

“No. It would be worth everything,” Erik rasped. 

Charles thought of his mother’s insistence that he always be carried separately from his chair, saying she was afraid he’d fall out. As if he was made of porcelain, as if he could be broken by the softest blow. Erik had very different ways of protecting him, but he too had until now carried Charles himself and let Edie take the chair. Charles could not allow that to continue. It was a disservice to both of them if he allowed it.

He took Erik’s face between his hands and raised it to look at him. “I want you to take me with you,” he said. “When you go killing.”

“I can’t,” Erik said, voice sounding rusty against his bruised throat. “You’ll be hurt.”

“I will be unexpected, and that will protect me,” Charles said firmly. “And if you teach me how to kill, it will aid me as well.”

\---

Charles and Edie made Erik promise he would not go back to the opium dens or even to the bottle; he was to live like a priest, they impressed upon him. Within two days he broke his promise, fishing some _madak_ mix of poppy and tobacco out of a box hidden behind his dresser and sitting on the bay window in his room to smoke it. Edie was out, but Charles heard his mind almost as soon as he’d begun. He sat at the bottom of the stairs and shouted, furious and frustrated at not being able to physically reached his housemate. 

At last Erik appeared at the top of the stairs and Charles told him he could smell the opium from his room below. He made Erik bring him upstairs and then went around Erik’s room, hunting down all Erik’s little hoards with some help from Erik’s thoughts. He threw everything onto the scrapheap in the outside yard. 

Erik came home with more opium smuggled into his coat less than a week later. Charles was there to catch him at it, though it was late at night. 

“The mind grows dependent,” he pleaded with Erik. “You must break yourself of this habit or it will consume you.”

Erik promised he’d try. Charles paid for the rent that week with all the spare cash that he had. 

Erik sickened with the craving. He lay in bed sweating and whimpering when he thought Charles was all the way downstairs and couldn’t hear. Charles tried to block out Erik’s mind from his periphery, but when he could sense Erik he felt tingly and anxious himself as if trying to break his own drug-habit. After a day of this he made Erik sleep on the settee downstairs with a blanket so that he could check on him physically rather than telepathically. 

Recovery wasn’t as easy snapping one’s fingers, but slowly Erik’s health turned around and he began leaving the house for long, lonely walks as he built us his strength. Charles and Edie kept up the pressure and Erik found a job soon after. It was something in Scotland, someone using blackmail and debt-strings to control the people around them, force ahead a wedding. Erik didn’t bring Charles this time, but when he came back he sat up late with him talking through the kill, how he set it up, the unpredictable parts of the equation that he accounted for with backup strikes and failsafes, the feeling of dragging the body to a stream and arranging it and the horse in such a way to make it all seem like an accident. 

Give people enough obvious clues, Erik explained, and they believe the easiest truth. Obvious clues can be anything, but most importantly they must make people feel clever for figuring it out. 

The money from this job was enough for the rest of the years’ rent. 

\---

They made their first kill together a month later. The victim was a brothel-owner keeping his ladies like slaves. Erik didn’t charge more than the cost of a carriage to and from the location. One of the women was the sister of a friend of a friend, and he knew nobody could afford to hire his services for this particular job. Nobody cared enough. Charles played the part of the client to get them into the pleasure-house, Erik pretended to be his live-in nurse, and befriending the brothel-owner and getting him to invite them into his office for a whiskey was cruelly easy. 

Charles didn’t think, when he went in, that he could possibly carry through with it. But then they were sitting in the warm office among silk-print hangings and the brothel-owner was waving his crystal decanter and talking about the women as if they were horses. Charles saw in his mind the things he’d done to them, with the same hands pouring the amber liquor into Charles’ glass from a crystal decanter. He saw how the man had enjoyed it; not even the sex, not even arousal, but the _power_. 

He wheeled in close and put his knife in the man’s gut. He wanted to whisper in the man’s ear, _I know your soul, and so does Hell_ , but it wasn’t as clean and swift as last time; the man was already fighting and trying to escape and Erik had to finish him off before someone heard the commotion. 

\---

A few months later they were between jobs, sitting up late playing chess, and Charles asked, “What happened to your father?”

Erik looked over the board with a sharpness in his eyes that said _don’t_ , but he answered anyway, “He was murdered.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a Jew,” Erik cleared his throat and moved a rook into Charles’ territory. 

“Did you seek justice?” Charles kept his eyes on Erik’s face even though Erik was refusing to look at him.

Erik shook his head. “I was just a child. Edie and I had to run from the mobs soon after. We travelled for a long time, and she taught me to shoot and throw a knife and pick a lock. I don’t know where she learned it.” He shut his mouth and said deliberately, “Your move.”

Charles drained his glass and leaned forward to consider the board. “My father died when I was a child, too. I don’t really remember him. I don’t think he saw me much. Mother said I must be kind to him, because life was so hard. Because he had no sons to go hunting with or take into town to see the offices,” Charles smiled, but it was a small smile. He pushed a bishop to take one of Erik’s knights. “Check.”

Erik took the bishop immediately. They played in silence for a couple of moves, until, “Checkmate,” Erik said, moving his rook.

Charles laughed. “Very good.”

“Another?”

“Let’s just sit a while,” Charles suggested, picking up his empty glass. Erik got up to clear the board away and bring a refill for both of them. Charles’ chair was beside the sofa, and instead of returning to his armchair Erik settled himself on the end of the sofa, as close to Charles as he could get. He picked up Charles’ hand.

“How did it happen?” Erik asked, his finger tips making little flutters of sensation across Charles’ knuckles. Charles didn’t need to ask _how did what happen?_ He answered without reluctance.

“I was,” a pause to think, “three and a half. We were visiting a friend’s garden, a big spreading piece of land out in the country, and I had run away from my mother,” his breath caught in his throat as, just for a moment, he imagined he could remember the sensation of running through long grass. But the child in his memory was faceless, a fancy he’d created in the years since, “I came across two men duelling, I don’t know why, over a woman I expect. They had brought witnesses and a referee, but no one saw me. I heard my mother calling me and turned to look for her. One of the men’s shots went wide and hit me, here, but on my back,” Charles indicated a spot low on his abdomen. 

Erik’s fingers were still mapping out the skin of his hand, as if in the hopes of recognising its every curvature even in the darkest cavern. He lifted it to his mouth and breathed softly on the pads of Charles’ fingers, pressed his lips to Charles’ middle digit before slipping it into his mouth to the first knuckle. He sucked gently, and Charles felt his tongue, its surface rough as if calloused, swirl a wet circle around the tip. 

“Do you even see me?” Charles asked. “Do you see anyone? Or do people and walls and kitchen sinks all just conjoin as constituents of the world in your eyes? Do you give any thought beyond deliberating about which ones need to be broken next?”

Erik’s released Charles’ finger from his mouth and raised his eyes to meet his. “The difference to me is that only objects break; people don’t break. They are alive or dead.”

“What do you mean, people don’t break?” Charles demanded.

Erik cupped his face with one hand and his palm felt as hot as a blacksmith’s against Charles’ cheek. “I look at you. Alive. Intact. That’s all I see.” 

He rose up and leaned over the arm of the sofa as if over a balcony and kissed him. Charles felt every muscle in his awareness tense, contract to its utmost, and then release, as Erik’s mouth pressed down on his, as Erik’s hand behind his head held him in place. He thought, _this is strange_ , and then, _I saw this in his mind many times, if I’d only recognised it_ , and he opened his mouth and reached up to take hold of Erik’s collar with both hands. 

\---

Edie figured it out pretty quickly, of course. Maybe it was Erik's hand lingering a little too long on Charles' when he bade him good night, or something about the way they spoke to each other over the dinner table - a nuance underneath the niceties that hadn't been there when they were simply housemates. But Edie knew her son. She knew when he was troubled, when he'd had a glass of wine, when he was thinking about his father and when he was hiding details of his work from her. She even knew the weight of him in her arms, conscious and unconscious, from several incidents where a job had gone wrong or someone had come looking for revenge. Most of all, perhaps because it was the rarest of his moods, she knew when he was happy.

But she herself had never been so afraid for him.

\---

Charles lay propped up in bed, trying to read a serial he’d bought in town. It was an adventure story about pirates or some nonsense, should have been the easiest thing in the world to read, but he couldn’t concentrate.

Edie’s and Erik’s minds were sparring like hawks over carrion. He could hear their voices faintly through the ceiling – the harshness of them sounded German, but he couldn’t make out words beyond Erik’s frustrated, _“Mama!”_.

He knew he was the subject of the row. He’d glimpsed it with the lightest touch against Edie’s thoughts, but had drawn back at once. It took effort to keep away from the loud, furious glow of her mind. It was like trying to ignore someone shouting your name. He rather suspected that his powers, whatever their origin, were growing stronger week by week. They had come in exceedingly useful on many of the jobs: Erik seemed to have the supernatural ability to wrestle knives from any assailant and on the very rare occasion where they had been shot at, he displayed the devil’s luck in avoiding the bullet. But Charles could not manoeuvre so quickly in a tight spot, and relied heavily on hearing the attacker’s thoughts in time to counteract them. He was getting quite good at it; men with daggers made the oddest faces when he could predict and evade all their ‘surprise’ attacks.

But it was a daily strain to block out all the thoughts he didn’t want to hear – the pity of strangers on the street, Edie’s increasing concern about his relationship with her son, the dark daydreams that Erik often drifted into when he had nothing else to occupy his mind.

_“Nein! Ich will nicht!”_ Erik’s voice cut through the distance and floorboards between them. Charles flinched; Erik’s mind had turned glacial, pieces breaking off and buffeting Charles back and forth. No matter how he tried to stay afloat, they pushed him down into the cold ocean of his own thoughts.

There came heavy footsteps on the stairs and then the slamming of the front door. Erik’s black glacier faded away, and Charles had to admit he was glad. But Edie was still a churning estuary to deal with and when she followed Erik down the stairs and then turned the corridor towards Charles’ room. He found the pages of the thin book blurring before him, and a rising pressure inside his skull like a light growing faster than his eyes could adjust, and nausea began a slow climb up his gut—

“Mr Xavier?”

Charles looked up. Edie stood in the doorway. He hadn’t even heard her enter. He fought to focus on the shape of her plum-coloured dress, the concern in her features.

“Evening,” he croaked, smiling shakily at her.

“I’m sorry, I… if you’re unwell, I’ll speak to you tomorrow…” Edie stepped back and reached out to close the door.

“No!” he raised his hand. If she went to bed with it on her mind, God, he didn’t think he’d sleep a wink. He lowered his voice. “Please. Tell me. You want me to leave, don’t you?”

She stood with her hand on the knob, the creases on her worn brow tightening over her eyes. Then slid across to his bed, settling herself in his wheelchair. She held out her hand, palm up, and he put his own into it.

“Erik told me…” Edie shook her head, “how he feels about you.”

Charles waited for her to continue. Now that she was speaking, her thoughts were less intense, her mind focused on constructing her ideas rather than picking at them. But as the silence stretched out, he could feel her anxiety returning, her desire to escape tightening in and her fears circling.

He grabbed her hand between both of his. “Edie, this is not some sudden sickness or corruption. This has always felt natural to me. Some of the ancient Greeks believed love between two of the same sex was the only true fidelity, that marriage was nothing more than a method of producing children. Aristophanes, for instance, in the _Symposium_ -“

“Oh, Mr Xavier, hush,” Edie said, and the creases on her brow smoothed as she smiled. “I don’t want to hear about your Greeks. I can’t pretend to revel in Erik’s particularities, but it’s been a long time since I thought I could still sway them toward convention.” She reached out with her rough, thin hand and brushed his cheek. “But that is how Erik goes about being Erik. Sometimes I thought I’d been given a changeling, sometimes I thought something in him was broken or missing and prayed for him to be healed. I know now that Erik is precisely as Erik must be. I feel sometimes like people are carved of soap or soil or wood, but his mold was filled with white-hot iron that never fully cooled. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hold him without leather gloves. And now you hope to…” she let her hand drop. “Erik destroys, Mr Xavier. He channels it as best he can, but in the end, it’s all he knows how to do. He’ll destroy you and himself in the process.”

“Edie, I think you are already dearer to me than my own mother, God rest her,” Charles answered. “But you can’t make my decisions for me.”

“This is my house,” Edie said quietly. “If I ask you to leave for your own good, you will leave.”

Before he could answer, she pulled her hand out of his grasp and stood, her hand pressed to her mouth as she hurried out.

\---

Erik came in a few hours later, and Charles snapped awake to the sound of him kicking off his boots in the front hall. Drowsy and chilled, before he thought about it, Charles pushed his thought towards Erik. _Come to me._

He felt Erik’s mind shift from a churlish muddle to sharp awareness. Soon his footsteps paused outside Charles’ door. He entered. There was the whump of him discarding his coat, probably on Charles’ clean floor. The mattress sunk as he climbed onto it and settled on top of the covers, his chest against Charles’ back. His arm curled over and clamped Charles tight against him.

“I felt like you were summoning me,” he murmured against Charles’ hair.

“I was,” Charles said, his eyes open but unable to make out anything against the curtained room. Before he could stop himself he said in a rush, “I keep hearing people’s thoughts. And your mother wants me to leave. She thinks you’re bad for me.”

Erik was silent for so long that Charles thought he’d gone to sleep, and Christ, that would just be like damned, stone-cold Erik. But finally Erik whispered, “It’s my fault.”

“No it’s not.”

“It is. I told her I’d die if you left.”

“You what?”

“You heard me,” Erik wriggled and adjusted his chin into a more comfortable position. He let out a long sigh, his breath hot on Charles’ neck. “She thinks I’m obsessed and that it will all fall down around our ears and I’ll end up murdering you for love and then probably committing suicide. She knows me too well, I suspect. But that’s not what will happen.”

“Oh. Er, good,” Charles said, which was really all the answer he could give.

“I promise, Charles. It's how I know how true this is. If you go, I won't drive myself mad, I will let you live and be happy. I’ll do the best to do so myself. And we will write, and you will marry,” Erik’s hand was unbuttoning the collar of Charles’ nightgown and sliding inside. He lipped at Charles’ earlobe and Charles felt a shudder of longing run through him, “and have children-”

“I can’t, my legs-”

“Oh yes, you can. I know men in your state who’ve had dozens. And we will write to each other,” his fingers rolled Charles’ nipple gently and Charles’ breath hitched and then Erik pinched and he made a very undignified noise, and Erik continued to talk in between the kisses he was lining up on Charles’ neck, “and I will keep your letters in a locked box made of cherry-wood, and read them when my mind drifts towards the opium pipe, and instruct the notary to bury the box on top of my heart,” Erik pushed himself up onto his elbow to curve over Charles and kiss the corner of his mouth, “and one day long after we have died your grandchildren will find my letters in your cabinet and burn them, terrified by all the savage and debauched things I have written to you over the years,” he sucked a ring of heat into the edge of Charles’ jaw, “and only then will we finally be separated.”

Charles turned his head up to meet Erik’s mouth. He tasted blood, felt a flash of pain from Erik, but they were both too far gone to care. Charles didn't even notice that Erik had totally dismissed his claim that he could read thoughts. 

\---

Erik was absent from the bed when Charles awoke. For just a moment he thought he was back in his childhood home, somehow rebuilt, somehow trapping him in its delicacies and soft care once more, and then he struggled with the blankets and felt Edie’s mind next door in the kitchen, a troubled thrum like a heart beating slightly too fast, and Erik a brooding cloud somewhere else in the house. He dressed and washed his face, then wheeled himself quietly past the kitchen door until he got to the drawing room.

“Good God, Erik,” Charles gaped. “What’s happened to your face?”

Erik was sitting at the piano, playing very poorly as he always did. He’d stopped at the sound of Charles’ voice. One of his eyes was swollen half-shut and there was a deep split on his lower lip. Charles hadn't been able to see any of this in the dark the night before. He remembered the taste of blood.

Erik smirked, and then winced as this pulled at the split lip. “I got into a fight.”

“Last night? After arguing with Edie?”

“I went to a bar. There was a man saying things I won’t repeat, and I hit him.”

“Oh, _Erik_ ,” Charles got right up close to the piano stool and turned Erik’s head towards him. “I shouldn’t have been kissing this, you wooden-headed fool! Go and get the iodine right now. Though it’s probably too late already to save your stupid face from gangrene. Go on,” he slapped Erik’s thigh and watched him trot off, laughing at Charles' exasperated expression. Rolling his eyes, Charles played a one-handed scale up the piano keys while he waited for him to return.

He felt Edie’s presence before he saw or heard her. When he looked up, she was standing in the doorway.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” he said, before she could speak.

She shook her head. “No. You won’t.”

Frowning, he reached out to test her thoughts. She was quite serious. “Why did you change your mind?” he asked.

“He leaves me cursing and gets into a fight. He comes out of your room this morning smiling and apologising. I was wrong,” she glanced down at her clasped hands, hissing a long breath through her teeth. “You touch hot iron and you are not burned, Mr Xavier. You are changing my little changeling. I was wrong.”

Charles looked away, but she took a few steps into the room. “Can you forgive me?”

“Of course,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. Of course he could. He already had.

“Well,” Edie smoothed down her apron. “In that case, breakfast is on the table.”

\---

Three days later, Charles signed his inheritance away to Cain Marko.

It had all come to a head in the last mediation. Cain had waved the court papers in his face, shouting so hard his cheeks began to purple and the whiskey veins on his nose looked ready to burst. 

"I will have you sent to bedlam, you ungrateful cripple!" he bellowed. "I will make it so you never see the outside world for the rest of your days! So you cannot even write a letter without a doctor looking over your shoulder! I - will - not - stand - for your selfish, addled stubbornness any longer! _Give me what is mine!"_

His lawyers had found a way. Charles' own team told him regretfully that Cain could pay a doctor to diagnose Charles as invalid, sign a few papers and bribe a particular judge not to read them too closely, and in moments all of the freedoms he had gained since his parents died would be gone. He would be Cain's, utterly and helplessly, and he knew that even if he cut all contact and tried to stay low at the Lehnsherr home, Cain would find him. Cain would throw him into an institution out of spite, or have him sent to some private country hospital in Spain where he would be isolated, controlled, barely able to speak the language and penniless unless Cain was feeling generous. And who knew what revenge his stepbrother might take against Edie and Erik? Charles liked to think they could defend themselves, but physical threats of violence were different from Cain's ability to plow headlong through people's lives, shielded by his money and his lawyers. 

And Cain's thoughts _hurt_. Charles was knocked down again and again by Cain's anger until the inside of his skull was full of bruises. The pecking whispers of the lawyers' minds surrounded him until he felt as if he were in a ring of swords, forced closer to Cain's mind no matter where he tried to escape. The harder he focused on closing his gift off, the less he could concentrate on his own thoughts, the less he could find the words to argue. 

In the end, Cain made him give over control of ninety-five percent of the liquid assets, and all of the businesses and properties. Even the miserable little villa in Bournemouth was to be Cain’s. Charles had spent many summers there with Cain and cousin Raven, where Raven had carried him on her back up and down from the cold, stony beach, hiding from Charles' stepbrother and their parents and making magic cairns to the sea-faeries (they were blue and scaly, Raven said, with bright red hair, she saw them in her dreams and insisted Charles would see them if he looked hard enough). It would no doubt sold off as soon as possible. 

What was left gave Charles enough to survive on, not uncomfortably, for a few years. After that he'd find his own way. He had Erik, he had his health, his freedom and he had a roof over his head – he would give up his pride before any of those. 

He couldn't bring himself to go home afterwards, though he wanted desperately to sit somewhere quiet away from living minds. One of the younger lawyers took him to the nearest restaurant and bought him a drink, and the thoughts of the distracted, inebriated patrons of the bar were merely a sloppy chorus on his periphery. He began to pull himself back together. 

"It's strange," Charles said as they sat at a table in the corner, watching the candles flicker in the frosted glass above lanterns. "In a way I'm just relieved it's over. I feel sort of adrift, like a colonist sailing to the new world."

"Men like Marko always get what's coming to them," the lawyer consoled, patting his hand. Charles could hear in his mind that he didn't believe it. 

Edie arrived a few minutes later, though how she had tracked him down he'd never know. Erik was in Oxford meeting a contact about a job, and his mother had grown concerned when Charles hadn't arrived back at the usual time. She joined them for a drink, ordering a tall, dark beer that cost twice what Charles' had (the lawyer had offered to pay). 

"What are we drinking to?" she asked.

"The end of my family troubles," Charles said, as cheerfully as he could. When she prompted him, he told her everything that had happened and the extent of the damage to his finances. 

"Well," Edie said slowly, when he fell silent. "I am glad to hear it is over."

"I'll pay board same as I have," Charles babbled, "I wouldn't leave you out of pocket. I won't be a burden."

"You couldn't if you tried," Edie replied firmly. "The only question now is how to break the news to Erik without him... overreacting."

They both laughed, quietly at first and then breaking into guffaws. They clinked their glasses together and the lawyer looked between them with a small frown. 

\---

Erik was back the next day in time for dinner, full of plans for their next job and carrying an evening paper from the train station under his arm. He came into the dining room and kissed them each on the cheek while still wearing his hat until Edie scolded him into taking it off. Charles had stayed home all day, reluctant to face strangers or crowds after the mental beating that Cain's thoughts had given him. Erik's thoughts were upbeat and anticipatory, giving him a rush like a shot of mulled wine. Charles would not deny he loved Erik like this, in the days leading up to the kill. He worried that it was half the reason he participated in Erik's work, for the relief of feeling only Erik's contentment - for there was little else that other people's thoughts could do to make themselves heard overtop.

"Why are you so jolly? Have you been consuming that cursed drug?" Edie nagged, a pin poking from the corner of her mouth as she busily darned holes in Erik's working trousers. Erik flopped down on the couch beside Charles.

"He doesn't smell like it," Charles answered, leaning across to sniff Erik's neck.

"Look what's in the paper," Erik said, holding it open.

Charles pushed himself up straighter, taking the edges that Erik was holding out for him. Near the back, in the obituaries section, was a quarter-page article headlined FINANCIER DROWNS AT HOME. Charles' throat closed up.

"What is it?" Edie put the darning down on her lap.

Charles cleared his throat, "It's Cain. He drowned in his bathtub last night. The door was locked and the police say there was no sign of a struggle, so his doctors are presuming he had a fit."

Erik looked between them, grinning. "Oh, don't be such sourpusses," he scoffed. "He couldn't even pay people to enjoy his company. And now he's off your back, Charles! What's not to celebrate?"

Charles folded up the newspaper. "Were you really in Oxford yesterday, Erik?"

The confusion that twisted Erik's face was genuine; Charles could hear it in his thoughts. "Charles, I wouldn't have killed Cain - not without your permission!"

"If you did, you had poor timing, I suppose," Charles mused. "I gave in to Cain. I signed everything he asked of me. I wonder who will inherit it all now - he's got a second cousin in Leeds, I think."

Erik seized the paper back. "The bastard!" he snarled. "Takes everything from you and then dies! Oh, I would have killed him if I'd known he'd taken your money, believe you me, and I wouldn't have given him a peaceful drowning either. Bastard!"

"Don't get yourself in knots," Charles soothed. Erik's mind was growing stormy, and Charles fought to keep the thunder out of his own head. "At least this way no one can say I had motive. Oh, except revenge. I suppose that's a motive for most people, isn't it?" he said distantly. As he leaned across to put the paper on the side table, he glanced at Edie and realised she had gone back to her darning without backing him up, which she usually did when he was arguing with Erik.

The oddest idea occurred to him, and he couldn’t stop himself brushing his temple to confirm that it couldn’t possibly be-

Oh. 

“I bloody hope the police don’t come sniffing around,” Erik grumbled, stretching his arms across the back of the couch. “I’m sure I can prove I was in Oxford, but if they’re watching me too closely I should have to turn down the current job, far too risky. A lot of them know me and what I do, but they can’t ignore a death as high-profile as Marko’s.”

“The Oxford thing is perfectly convenient for you. And they can’t suspect me. Cain’s bathroom is on the second floor,” Charles said, resting his chin on his hands. He was still watching Edie. “So we’re all in the clear, then.”

Edie glanced up at him, “I should expect so.”

Later, while Erik was upstairs having a bath of his own with his pipe in his mouth (only tobacco – Charles checked every time), Charles came to help Edie tidy up the ground floor before bed. Her mind was whispering to herself in German, but Charles could only make out one phrase, _Most important thing is to look after my boys_. As she knelt to flatten out a wrinkle in the carpet, he asked, “Do you think sometimes, maybe Erik is not such a changeling after all?”

Edie smoothed her worn, thin, but still strong hands across the carpet, as if stroking the flank of an old workhorse after a long day in the field. She nodded without looking up. “Yes, sometimes.”

She didn’t offer any more than that, and it was the only conversation they would ever have on the matter.


	6. the turn

A few weeks later, Charles said over breakfast, "I think we should go after the worst of the opium dens."

Edie clicked her tongue and went back to her newspaper. Erik was chewing on a mouthful of toast. He took his time before he said, "What harm do they do?"

"Most of them? Not much worse than pubs that serve men who can't stop drinking, I suppose," Charles steepled his fingers. "But I have been investigating a sudden bloom of them in the lower quarters. Over the past year, eight or nine have sprung up and another fourteen have been bought or intimidated into giving profits and control over to what seems to be an increasingly powerful cartel - I don't know for sure if it's a single entity. But they're importing the raw opium from the Americas and processing it here, in London. It's not illegal to import raw opium anyway, and the police only have the manpower to search Chinese ships. But the breed they’re importing and way the cartel is processing is different - the result is much more potent. The number of people dependent on the drug grows every day, and I believe if we don't act soon, then the cartel cannot be brought down without a significant effect on its customers," he nodded at Erik. "You remember the sickness that plagued you when you stopped smoking it."

"Vividly," Erik rumbled.

"Imagine that, but on a huge scale across London. The demand would be overwhelming, the void would quickly be filled by a similar trade. If we bring down the cartel now and destroy the latest shipment, the remaining independent dens who use the milder poppy breeds from China should be able to cope with demand."

"Are you sure?"

"Not at all, but the later we leave it, the worse it will be."

Erik dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Alright. I’ll talk to some of my contacts in the police. Murray MacTaggert might help. He’s always nagging me to leave things to the coppers if anything genuinely illegal is going on.”

“But the opium imports aren’t illegal,” Charles pointed out.

“MacTaggert, like me, considers the word to fit his own morality,” Erik grinned. “I’ll pay him a social call. His right-hand man, McCoy, is horrifically intelligent for a blue bottle – he’ll sniff out the smallest misdemeanours in this cartel’s business and slant it to the heads of Scotland Yard in such a way that they can’t refuse sending in a pack of bobbies.”

“Splendid,” Charles grinned. “If you could convince them to seize the shipment when it comes in next month, that would be ideal timing. You and I can start picking off the less savoury den managers until then – working from the middle, if we can, to scare the amateurs and veterans alike. We want them to scatter, I feel is best. We can’t really take them all down, we’re only two men and we don’t know how many are truly complicit and how many haven’t a clue of the bigger picture. We’ll burn their remaining stocks on the night the police take the incoming opium. What we really need is to find out who’s in charge-” he didn’t say, _I can read their minds as we go,_ he wished he had to courage to explain it but he didn’t, “-and take that keystone out with enough force to scare whoever’s left away from the throne.”

Erik smiled. Charles could hear the slow tide of _murder, justice, purpose_ beginning to rise to the gravity-pull of the plan. He could see the bones under Erik’s face, the day’s growth of stubble he was too lazy to trim, and as he leaned forward to get another piece of toast, Charles marvelled at the tiny glimpse of the tendons in his neck that disappeared into his umber cravat. He thought tentatively (and perhaps for the first time consciously), _this man is mine. I have no fear of losing him. He keeps no secrets from me. He is mine._

He was a little shocked by how intensely this thought pleased him.

\---

The first time he began to genuinely fear for his sanity was when he went to meet Erik for lunch, at noon after Erik had gone to have a word with Officer MacTaggert. When the carriage driver helped him down onto the corner where Erik had said to meet, he found there was no pavement and the cobbles were not conducive for the wheels of his chair. The driver didn’t want to leave him, but Charles waved him away.

Erik was nowhere in sight and there was too much traffic to stay where he was. Already two carts deviated around him and the familiar, rising hum of irritation was building under the polite faces of the foot traffic. He had automatically blocked it out, but now he touched his temple and found himself swept into the crowd of thoughts. It was like being adrift in a torrent, but he’d been teaching himself to swim these past two years. All his mechanisms were discovered by trial and error, and took strength he didn’t always have, but as long as he took a few hours or a day to rest up in the house afterwards he could manage. He pushed aside the crowd of thoughts he found in the vicinity until he spotted the familiar anchor of Erik’s mind. Charles locked onto it and began to wheel himself laboriously over the uneven ground. 

Charles parked himself beside the fountain in the middle of the square, a worn old copper statue of fish-tailed horses above cherubs and herons, painted garishly. He could see Erik coming into the square and Charles raised his hand to wave. He sent out a little burst of, _Look this way!_ as he did it, and Erik spotted him.

There were two-dozen schoolgirls in navy-blue uniforms and wide hats, led by two nuns in full habit. They streamed between Charles and the approaching figure of Erik, briefly blocking him out, and Charles had been so focused on summoning his friend that he didn’t have the makeshift barriers up around his mind. And suddenly his attention was drawn by the girls, twenty-four preteens, and their minds were so LOUD and they were so ALIVE and chattering, clamouring, all of them, cheerful and confident and ALL SO MANY SHOUTING THEIR THOUGHTS GOD HE’S BREATHING WATER--

The world swooped around him and he felt himself as a spot on a spinning sphere revolving around a great furnace that had burned throughout all creation, and there were people across the ocean who had never seen the colour of marmalade and the nuns were full of Godliness so pure he’d never imagined and the children were separate entities each unique, everyone lives alone and isolated in their own world and Erik was sprinting towards him but everything was on its side God had turned the world sideways like a crooked painting and he couldn’t remember Mother’s face but he wondered if she suffered as her world become smoke and cinders and pain he wondered if he’d had this much power then, if he could have caught hold of her mind and guided her out of the burning house, or if indeed he would have if he could have, and he thought the nuns might have heard that because there was shock and fear on their faces and everything was--

White. 

And now Erik. He could feel Erik’s arm around the back of his shoulders, only Erik would grip him that hard with his other hand on Charles’ chest. He wondered why Erik was pushing so hard. He blinked against the grey light and Erik’s face appeared close and filling his vision. He realised that wasn’t Erik pushing, that was gravity pulling him down. He was on his back and Erik was cradling him, like a damn child, _damn it_ , not in public with the nuns standing with their minds churning a clockwork routine of prayers and concern. The girls were clustered around, trying to see the drama, but their curiosity was singular and easier to bear. His wheelchair lay on its side close by, and above it rose the fountain of cherubs and water-horses, spluttering doggedly into the air.

“Charles,” Erik repeated, probably for the fourth or fifth time since Charles’ ears started working again. “Charles. What happened? Can you see me?”

“Yes, dear man, I’m alright,” Charles tried to push himself up on his own, but he couldn’t seem to find his own limbs among the multitude of bodies surrounding him. “Leave me be, for God’s sake.”

Erik and the nuns all flinched at the blaspheme. 

\---

He wanted to do lunch as they’d planned, but Erik took him home. Charles sulked and acted childishly annoyed, but only because he was secretly glad. The streets were took much, too noisy, too rippled through with emotions like colour in marble. He needed the relative space and quiet of the house.

For the first time since that night Edie asked him to leave, he wanted to tell Erik that he could hear his thoughts. He could hear Erik’s _could be fever could be oncoming typhoid should call a doctor_ , his _the way he felt in my arms oh G-d didn’t know I could feel so like an animal so instinctive to protect_ , his _the way he moves when he knows I’m watching beautiful drives me mad_. Charles turned his face away, resting his chin on his hand. How could he explain it? How could Erik not hate him for the violation of his privacy?

“Has this happened before?” Erik asked, following Charles like a large guard dog as Charles headed for the whiskey cabinet in the corner. Alcohol would blunt his powers, yes, that would help. Erik added, “Should you be drinking?”

“I’m perfectly well,” Charles said. “It was the heat. I had a turn. I feel better now.”

“It’s not even warm out.”

“It was hot in the carriage, when I came over.”

“ _Charles._ ”

Charles drank two fingers of whiskey and poured himself another. Within a minute he felt a heady rush of blood to his head. He kept drinking. He had to get out of Erik’s head, draw back from the distant mumbles of the neighbours’ thoughts, had to make himself sleep until the aches and stings in his brain began to fade.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Erik snarled, crowding in to stand between him and the liquor cabinet. 

“I tell you everything. Can you move out of my space?” Charles wheeled himself back a few paces. Erik’s mind thumped like the mallet on the drum of Charles’ head, _thump fear thump frustration thump insecurity thump_. Christ, Charles could not deal with other people, he couldn’t, he could not do this and especially not with Erik who he liked so much when he had been stone cold action and rationale. People always turned into emotionally-enslaved idiots eventually, that was the thing you learned when you listened to their heads long enough. Nobody really knew how to think rationally, and that meant nobody acted rationally, and that meant nothing Charles had done in his life was reasonable or just. 

“Charles, I’m not trying to coddle you!” Erik chased him towards the door. “I’m trying to help!”

“If you don’t know when it’s not wanted then they’re the same thing,” Charles shot back as he disappeared into his room. 

\---

Two years. Two years since Erik Lehnsherr had burned his childhood home to the ground, literally and figuratively. Tonight the police would be waiting for a shipment of raw opium from Argentina, waiting to stem the flow of poison into London’s veins. But Erik and Charles still didn’t know where the rest of the stocks were kept, or where to find the leader of the cartel. 

But here they were. Charles and John Allerdyce, in the back room at the last opium den on their list. Charles with the gun, John relieved of his knife (and one and a half fingers). Waiting on the edge.

\---

“Who the hell are you?” John moaned through gritted teeth, trying to tourniquet his bleeding hand with a kerchief. He was shaking too much to tie the knot, and his brain had scattered his knot-tying memories anyway. His old man had been a sailor, before he’d met his messy end, but John had always hated the water and never paid attention to his father’s infrequent lessons.

“My name is Xavier. I could be your friend,” the man in the chair pouted. “If you just tell me a couple little things, I’ll come over there and help you bandage yourself up. You can be on your way in five minutes. Mostly intact and everything.”

“Yes, yes, come over here,” John gave a laugh that sounded a lot higher than he’d meant it to be. “I’ll show you what’s what, you pasty little brat.”

“That’s no way to make friends, John. Come on. Tell me where they process the opium and tell me to whom you report. Then I’ll let you go.”

“Go stick your head in a cesspit,” John spat. 

Xavier fired past his left ear, and John felt a few strands of his sideburn caught by the force of the passing bullet. He lurched sideways with a cry.

“The names,” Xavier said quietly. “Or the next one goes through your eye.”

“Quay B-59, in the east Russian neighbourhood!” John gasped, cradling his injured hand. “Sebastian Shaw! I answered to Sebastian Shaw! He’s there, he’s always there…”

He felt his racing heart slow as Xavier angled the barrel of the gun to the ceiling and uncocked it. “Thank you, John.”

John raised his gaze. Now was his chance to get the rotter, get him good, teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget if he lived through it… but at that moment, Xavier tilted his head. “I wouldn’t do what you’re thinking, my friend. Making a grab for the gun while I have it uncocked? It won’t go well for you.”

John narrowed his eyes. “Then be on your way. I’ll find you, cripple. Your head is mine.”

“Oh, dear, dear,” Charles clicked his tongue. “Now you’ve done it. He heard you.”

“Who?” John sneered. Something brushed at the edge of his awareness. It sounded an awful lot like footsteps in the darkened corridor. His heart didn’t seem to have any more speed left in its sprint.

“Didn’t you wonder what happened to your employees?” Xavier asked, the gun in his lap now and his hands resting lightly on the arms of his chair. “You noticed someone had been through the office, but they hadn’t raided the safe.”

John’s eyes widened. There was someone standing in the doorway behind Xavier. The man was in nothing but trousers and a white cotton vest, or what had been a white cotton vest but was now white with an array of red spots. A drip of sweat rolled off the end of John’s nose.

Splatters, rather. They weren’t spots, they were splatters. The man’s hands were red too, almost to the elbows. 

“All done, Erik?” Xavier asked lightly.

“I asked them to surrender,” the man purred. There was a very long knife tucked into his belt. “They did not endorse the idea. I don’t think they were fully informed of the consequences.”

“Now, now don’t look at me like that,” John took a ragged step back, hitting the open safe door. It was cold iron, and it seemed impossibly to be curling around John’s leg a little. As Erik reached for the knife, John threw a finger towards Xavier. “He said he’d me go, that’s what he said, if I told him what he wanted-“

Erik leaned down over the man in the chair. One arm reached up and snaked around the back of Xavier’s head, brushing his folded hand down the man's cheek. His knuckles left behind two trails of blood. “Should I?” he whispered softly in Xavier’s ear.

John felt most of his internal organs wither and wriggle down into the very back corner of his torso. He found he couldn’t make his barren throat swallow.

Xavier tipped his head back into the touch. “John Allerdyce,” he said, in a dry, schoolmasterly voice. “I learned something about you John. I think you’ll remember. What happened to Albert Hoyden’s boy, John? When he didn’t pay his debts to the cartel?”

John’s throat finally unlocked, but the words wouldn’t come. He remembered how he’d managed to wrap a single hand right around the thin neck, how unexpectedly tough it had been, like gristle in the middle of a steak. He remembered how he’d laughed, drawing it out, because of the stupid noises the kid had made. 

Xavier’s face wrinkled, barely noticeably, as if he could really see the truth in John’s face. 

“Yes. That’s what I thought,” Xavier said. 

“No! No, wait!”

Erik stepped around the chair, his head low and his eyes glittering black in the candlelight. His crimson fingers flexed stickily around the handle of the knife.

“I gave you what you wanted! Just let me go! I won’t tell anyone you were here!”

No one answered his cries from inside the building; no one outside was close enough to hear.


	7. into the fire

The house at the root of Quay B-59 was built back from the road, and the streetlamps nearby had not been lit. It must have been an indoor market in its past, for the doors were wide enough to drive a two-horse cart through and the bottom floor was twice as tall as the top. The thin light of candles upstairs and down. A man with shoulders so wide he looked like an ape loitering around the smaller entrance built into the huge door.

Erik was reporting all this to Charles as they huddled in the shadows outside the house's perimeter. The carriage had dropped them a block away, and Erik was peering through a split in the river-swollen wood of the fence, searching hopefully for a subtle approach. But there was no cover beyond the fence, and they could lose precious time looking for a back route that, if it existed, would almost certainly by blocked.

"I'll take the man at the door," Erik rumbled.

While he was focused on surveillance, Charles had taken the chance to let his mental barriers down and investigate the minds inside the house. The bottom floor was packed and awake, enough people that he shied away at once in fear of the same swoon that overtook him in the square. Most of them were thinking in Mandarin, many apathetic and exhausted. Forced workers, perhaps. There was one English-Irish mind, slimy and a little stupid, evidently a supervisor. Charles shifted his focus to the top floor, and knew there was someone there, but the thoughts were - steely. His probe skimmed over them like a tossed stone across a frozen lake. Strange. He got enough to know that the man upstairs was the Mr Shaw that they are hunting, and that he was alone.

"If there are lights on downstairs, they're probably processing the opium right now," he told Erik confidently, as if it had simply occurred to him. "Shaw will no doubt be upstairs in an office, if he's here at all. That means he's yours to deal with. I'll convince the workers to leave by whatever means necessary," he patted the holster in his chair. "Then I'll make sure the stocks are here and get ready to torch the place. If you're in and out, this organisation will be dead and burning inside five minutes. Sound reasonable?"

"Sounds perfect," Erik smiled and his hand twitched toward the knife on his belt. He'd brought his biggest pistol, but Charles knew he preferred the quiet efficiency of the blade.

Less than a minute later, the guard was bleeding out on the ground with a gurgle and they were through the unlocked front door. Just as Charles had predicted, the lower floor was a busy workshop of dejected faces, the air thick with the tart, earthy smell of the raw gum. The supervisor was slouched in the far corner playing solitaire on an upturned crate. Charles had his pistol aimed at the man’s head before he even realized they were intruders.

“Stand up, quietly,” Charles said. The tap and scrape of the workers had dropped to a whisper. The supervisor got slowly to his feet, his hands held away from his body and his pulpy face turning rapidly to chalk. Erik nodded at Charles and dashed for the stairs.

“Alright, lads,” Charles said, inching his chair away from the door with one hand and then locking on his brakes and keeping the supervisor as his focus. “This factory is closing operations as of this minute. I suggest you all empty out of here as quick as you can.”

 

The workers didn’t need telling twice, flooding the aisles of the workshop and crowding to the door. A couple of them stuffed handfuls of gum into their pockets and down their shirts, others glancing with genuine concern at the supervisor, who with a gun in his face had decided not to move. Charles could feel tinges of relief from some of the worker’s minds, but mostly it was resignation and the beginnings of despair; this was their livelihood, no matter the coercion they might have faced and the downstream product. He forced away an elastic snap of guilt.

“This ain’t worth my dying for, I know that,” the supervisor said clammily. Charles could see the shape of a gun under his coat, but he hadn’t made any attempt to grab for it. “You let me go, I’ll run, I won’t hurry to the police or nothing.”

Charles jerked his head toward the door. “Run, then. Far as you can.”

“Yes, sir!” the supervisor sprinted for the exit, slamming the door shut behind him.

Charles holstered his pistol and set about spreading lamp oil across the dusty floorboards. He made sure to heavily douse the crates of raw opium in the corner. It was odd that he hadn’t heard a commotion from upstairs yet; perhaps Erik had caught Shaw completely by surprise, and the deed was done and over. It was odd, too, that only two men had guarded this house, and one of them was clearly not a dedicated servant. Shaw had to have known they would find him eventually. They'd been picking off his associates for weeks, working their way up the chain. Was he arrogant or just stupid?

Charles glanced up at the ceiling. Was that voices he could hear? He reached out for Erik’s mind and felt –

Knife-edge poise sinking into muddy indecision, the slow-trickle anger that was quintessentially Erik, and a growing fear, the instinct that Charles had learned to trust as well; that something had gone wrong.

Charles looked at the stairs on the far side of the workshop. He could feel his heart beginning to pound. The smell of the oil and gum was suddenly overpowering. He had to get up there, blast it all, he could still feel Shaw’s mind. The man wasn’t even agitated. Erik didn’t scare him, and Erik scared _everyone_. And Charles still couldn’t get a read on the bastard. Why hadn’t Erik ended it? This wasn’t like him, he didn’t play with his victims, he didn’t get any pleasure from drawing the job out.

Charles’ eyes fell on an alcove on the far side of the workshop from the stairs. He wheeled over as fast as he could. A brick-weighted pulley lift – for whatever reason, they had been transporting crates upstairs as well, and recently: when Charles leaned forward to look up the shaft, the weights were clearly in place. He tugged at the ropes, but they looked well-maintained and the mechanism was free of rust. With a quick prayer, he settled his chair on it and stretched over to release the ratchet.

He’d hovered his hand over the rope as the weights released, but at the sudden jerk of movement his fingers tightened around it automatically. This was a mistake. The bricks were far too heavy for him alone and the lift shot upwards. The rope ripped through his palm and kicked Charles’ retraction reflex automatically and he snapped his hand away. He bit down on the inside of his cheek, the pain so sharp it sent black clouds broiling across his vision, barely aware of how fast the lift was moving until it hit the top with a clang.

He swore inwardly. The noise had to have been heard in Shaw’s office. Charles tried to clench his rope-burned hand and felt it burst with pain again – he swore even worse, conjuring every cuss in every language that Edie had ever taught him when she was in a good mood. Of course he’d been stupid enough to take hold of the rope with his pistol hand, idiot, _idiot_. Well, nothing for it, he could fire with his left hand if need be.

With his good hand and the heel of the burned one he wheeled himself off the lift before something else went wrong and it sent him plummeting back to the ground. 

He was in a dim room, with nothing but faint lamplight crawling through the half-open door. Glass cylinders and tubes winked with myriad copies of his reflection. The air smelled of tinctures and solvents, including a sharp whiff of ammonia and formaldehyde. This was a laboratory – for what purpose, Charles didn’t care to divine right now. He could hear Erik’s voice, raised and barking, from somewhere beyond the doorway.

He made his way as quietly as he could, though the chair was harder to control without full use of his hand. He found himself in a thin corridor, the wallpaper peeling and faded, outside a door painted a dark green that looked black in the light of a dimmed gas lamp – this was a sophisticated operation indeed, if Shaw had paid to keep up the gas pipes when even the streetlamps outside had broken down.

He glanced at his wound in the better light and saw pearls of blood welling up across his flayed palm. He pulled out a clean kerchief and wrapped his hand up quickly, tying it tight with one hand and his teeth. Beyond the door, there came two voices, about equal distance from him, one unfamiliar and then a loud disagreement from Erik. Charles wanted to piggyback on their minds, get a scan of the setup he was walking into before he entered, but there was no more time. He pulled out his pistol with his good hand, turned the doorknob with the tips of his fingers, then shoved the door open and wheeled himself in. He raised his gun.

The man who must be Shaw was directly ahead, sitting behind a wide oak desk. The room was not tidy. Boxes and papers stacked wherever there was space and several chairs were sitting in wait for cronies who would never come here again. Shaw himself was tall and lean, neck tucked into a high-collared red blazer, and there was a serpentine set to his mouth, as if he was waiting to snap his jaws open and swallow his attackers whole. Charles kept the pistol barrel centred on his forehead.

“Keep your hands on the table, Mr Shaw,” he said.

And Shaw smiled. As if Charles was a servant who had arrived at last with the whiskey. “Mr Xavier,” he said, in a voice that was low and hissed at the edges. “I’m glad you found the lift. I tried to estimate the weight you’d need.”

Erik was in a second doorway on Charles’ left, but he was standing lax, his eyes flicking only briefly toward Charles. He hadn’t even drawn his knife. What the hell was going on?

“It’s nice to be welcomed,” Charles said dryly, and without taking his eyes from Shaw’s face he asked in a monotone. “Erik, any problems?”

Erik didn’t reply, but Shaw answered for him, gesturing fluidly with his hands. “I was just telling Erik how impressed I am with your reputation. Both your reputations. Every criminal in this city tells stories about you, you know. The man who weapons cannot touch, and his partner in the shadows, who knows what you’ll do before you move a muscle. It makes for thrilling listening,” he gave a mock shiver. The smile played on his lips once more, fingers steepling in front of his chin. “I had thought Erik’s gift was some form of psychic motion control, but he tells me it extends only to metal – remarkable, don’t you think?”

Charles wondered if he’d suddenly gone mad, or if Shaw was mad, or if there was some lingering effect of the opium penetrating their senses and making them all mad. He finally turned his head briefly to look at Erik in full. “Erik, what’s he talking about?”

“I could pose the same question to you,” Erik said quietly, gaze tight on Shaw’s face like there was a red-hot wire connecting them.

“Yes, do tell,” Shaw said. “What exactly can you do? Superhuman reflex? Some form of moment-to-moment precognition?”

Charles looked at him. He pushed out a tendril towards Shaw’s mind, and felt it ricochet off as it had before. It was like Shaw's skull was filled with empty landscapes and cold stone. Like he knew what Charles was trying to do and was compensating accordingly.

Charles’ jaw felt very stiff, but he managed to grind out, “I read minds.”

“Telepathy! Oh, wonderful!” Shaw clapped his hands together, but very softly, making only a faint _tup_. He looked at Erik, and his tone this time was more dangerous than it had been until now. “You really didn’t know. Either of you.”

Charles looked at Erik, who resolutely refused to look back. Shaw was chuckling, “All this time. How long have you been working together? A year, at least? And neither of you told each other. A little disappointing, really, I had admirably imagined you as an aspiring Achilles and his Patroclus, destinies entwined, inseparable until death. But you seem to have fallen into cahoots merely by chance.”

Charles could hear Erik’s thoughts streaming, _he tells me everything he tells me everything he tells me everything_. He clamped his barriers down hard, forcing out both the minds in the room. It didn’t matter. He knew what Erik was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing. Putting the hints together. Twice, he’d seen Erik shot at close range – and twice the shooter had miraculously missed. In an alley once, three men had gone at Erik with four knives between them. He’d disarmed them all without even putting his collar out of place. And no matter how hard the scientific part of Charles’ mind screamed, _no one can control metal with their mind!_ , the rational part replied calmly, _yes, but you hear people’s thoughts._

“It doesn’t make us any less dangerous,” Charles said. “Goodbye, Mr Shaw.”

“Oh, by all means, shoot me!” Shaw said brightly, almost manically, spreading his hands.

“Charles-” Erik spoke as last, in a voice like a wheat husk. “Charles, don’t-”

“Why not?” Charles snapped. He wanted to say, _I don’t like this, I don’t like what he’s saying, he knew we were coming and he’s sitting there mocking us and WE HAVE A JOB TO DO, DAMMIT._

“He says you’re dying,” Erik croaked.

Charles absolutely refused to acknowledge that piece of rot by looking at Erik. He kept his eyes on Shaw, who was now smiling blandly. “Been sneaking through the window and taking my temperature, has he?”

Shaw sighed, and Charles felt Erik’s attention snap back to him. He nearly shouted, _Stop looking at him, Erik, pay attention to ME._

“How are the headaches, Charles?” Shaw asked.

Charles’ flayed hand throbbed, and the pistol wobbled. He said after a pause, with what he thought was a dismissive tone. “I don’t get headaches.”

“Yes you do. And crowds are becoming difficult to manage, aren’t they, the stronger your powers grow?” Shaw entwined his fingers in front of him. “The insomnia will start next. Then the waking hallucinations. You might move out to the countryside – to get away from people, get some quiet. But soon even Erik’s thoughts out in the garden will become agony,” he waved his hand in Erik’s general direction, “and then you’ll forget what your own mind sounds like, how to think without the crutch of another human, even when other people hurt so, so terribly. I’ve seen it happen to others – other telepaths. Two died suddenly. Perhaps their hearts just gave out. The third killed herself.”

Charles felt everything, the pain in his hand and the scratch of his clothes and the pump of his heart and the shape of Erik in the corner of his eye, dwindle in his perception and fade away until Shaw filled the world like a flood.

“Oh, you’re not particularly unlucky. It affects all of us, the special few who have these paranormal abilities. Kinetics like Erik generally die of trauma, when even blinking can make a cabinet fly across the room. Those who can physically change their appearance or the quality of their flesh simply fall apart. I met a young man who could create ice from thin air. He froze to death in a boiling sauna, wrapped in woollen blankets. It’s as if,” Shaw hissed through his teeth, leaning back in his chair, “as if our bodies are not yet prepared for this miracle. Perhaps, in a few generations, nature will change that – Lamarck would certainly think so. But we are the unlucky trial run. Within five years of manifesting, we inevitably and fatally suffer from our own misplaced divinity-”

“ _Scheißdreck!_ ” Erik cut in. “I’ve had this power for more than a decade, it hasn’t killed me!”

“But it did begin to hurt, didn’t it, son?” Shaw tapped his nose. “When you first arrived in London, some six years ago. Your mother must have worried something dreadful, this strange illness, and the poltergeist shaking the cookware whenever precious Erik coughed?”

Erik fell silent. Charles still couldn’t bring himself to look at him, though he was aware that Erik had been carefully shifting around the edge of the room so that they were standing closer together. "I recovered," he said.

“That’s because you were given treatment, Mr Lehnsherr!” Shaw stabbed his fingers at his own chest. “I treated you! I saved your life. And look at you, scowling there like the child who didn’t get a big enough slice of treacle tart.”

“I’ve never even met you before tonight!” there was a note of desperation in Erik’s voice. Like Charles, he was lost in this slurry of claims, trying frantically to shuffle the facts from the manipulation.

“No, but I’ve had my eye on you for a very long time,” Shaw hummed. “And I’m very proud, you know. You, like me, have become a survivor – and something greater than what we were before. Capable of wielding a power others cannot even comprehend,” his mouth broke into a wide grin, and Charles could hear Erik breathing shallow and rapid.

Charles was sick of this. Games and riddles – and how dare Shaw play with Erik, string him along like a cat? Even if he truly had saved his life, Charles wouldn’t stand for it. He shot out the window right behind Shaw’s head. The explosion of the glass made Erik jump, but Shaw did not flinch. He turned chilly eyes on Charles.

“If there’s a cure, tell me what it is,” Charles said to Shaw, reloading the pistol quickly and letting a smile flicker on his face, “and we can all go home feeling charitable.”

“You really expect me to give you anything with a gun in my face? You, Mr Xavier, who they say is the most ruthless, cold-hearted beast in London? Who knows your deepest, darkest secrets and throws them back in your face before he kills you?” Shaw wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think so,” he returned his attention to Erik once more. “Come to my home. Listen to what I have to say. You’re free to leave afterwards, Mr Lehnsherr, all I’m asking for is an evening of your time. In returned, I guarantee that I will tell you how to save your companion’s life. Eventually I want to provide pro bono treatment to all of us whom I encounter.”

Charles could sense Erik's indecision even with his shields in place. He couldn't let this go on. While Shaw was watching Erik's reaction, Charles put two fingers of his injured hand to his temple and gave Shaw's veil a solid push. 

The empty stone at the forefront of Shaw's mind gave way, and for a moment Charles felt the rush of full exposure to the man's thoughts, and he gasped and pulled back. He felt like he'd been splashed with ammonia. Shaw's head turned instantly towards him. 

"Oh, Mr Xavier, that's not playing fair," he said. "Trying to steal my secrets to save your own skin? I just told you I've known other telepaths, don't think I didn't learn a thing or two about how you work. And all I'm trying to do is help you both," he looked back at Erik,."He is devious, Erik, but all our kind are worth saving. Come and listen."

And Erik replied, as if he was being strangled, "Very well."

"No," Charles demanded. "Erik, _no,_ this man is a snake!"

Shaw tsked his tongue, "Please, you hardly know me."

"Then let me get to know you a little better," Charles snarled, dropping the barrel of the pistol, and this time he clenched his teeth and pushed _hard_ , driving through the cold stone and ammonia sting of Shaw's defenses. He felt Shaw scramble to cover his thoughts, but it was like trying not to think of the Queen when someone said 'her majesty', and in a split second everything was laid bare.

Charles laughed. "Is that all? Is that your big secret?"

"You're bluffing," Shaw replied smoothly.

Charles looked at Erik smugly. "It's opium. It blunts these abilities we have, keeps them docile by changing our brains long after the drug itself has left our blood. He didn't give you some fantastical treatment, Erik, he just pulled a few strings to make sure your visits to opium dens became an unbreakable habit.”

“Impressive,” Shaw cut him off. “You are far more powerful than the others, Mr Xavier.”

Charles continued speaking to Erik as if he hadn’t heard Shaw’s interruption, “His head's full of cruelties, my dear, you mustn't listen to him. May I shoot him, now?"

Shaw and Charles were both staring intensely at Erik. The moment stretched out, brittle, and then Erik gave a tiny nod. 

Charles turned and fired. Shaw didn't even try to run. The bullet hit him in the chest, but his body did not jerk or twist with the impact. There was the faintest ripple against his blazer, and then nothing.

For a moment, no one in the room breathed.

Shaw raised his hand and picked the bullet out of the cavity where it had embedded in the breast of his blazer. He pinched it between the well-trimmed nails of his thumb and forefinger, bringing it close to his eye, and sighed heavily.

“You should have looked deeper,” he said, his gaze on the tiny ball of lead. He stood up slowly. “You might have been forewarned about _my_ ability. I steal energy, Mr Xavier, and I have been in the yard all afternoon playing with dynamite.”

They got no more warning than that. As he dropped the bullet, Shaw brought his hands together. This time the clap echoed like a thunder strike inside the very room, and from his grasp blossomed fire and several compounded concussions.

Charles felt arms around his shoulders, saw the floor leap up to meet him, was aware of Erik’s thoughts screaming of him – his name, his face, the weight of him within Erik’s hold, the love, the fear, the clarity of purpose that he gave to Erik.

For a split second, Charles’ only thought was, _I wish you could read my mind in return,_ and then their world was absorbed in the explosion.

\---

Charles raised his head. Cotton bandages seemed to be wrapped around his head and his brains were swilling in his skull. Above, he saw the night sky through the smoke, and the flames of the original explosion dissipating among them as if to join the stars. When he breathed, the air was hot as an oven and choked with ash, and when he put his hand to the floorboards he felt the shudder of the collapsing roof.

Shaw was gone. Charles was deaf, and his eyes strained to adjust. The explosion had faded, leaving only a few papers burning around them like helpful spirits. A dark pile of rubble lay in front of him. The house was brick-walled and the roof and support around Shaw’s desk were completely collapsed, but the beams above Charles and Erik were still holding.

Charles hacked at the air until the black clouds cleared from his vision, and propped himself up onto his elbow. He stretched his jaw, feeling it click, and cupped his rope-burned palm around his ear. At first there was only a far-off ringing, but slowly he made out the creak and clatter of the collapsing bricks. 

“-----?” he said. His vocal chords were trying to say, ‘Erik?’, but he could only feel the sound in his throat, not yet hear it except as a distant squeak. Next moment he realised that the shape in front of him that he had taken to be a pile of rubble was his friend, lying on his side with one arm still stretched out towards Charles. 

_“ Erik!”_ his far-off voice cried. Erik’s eyes were closed, and his leather jacket was still smouldering faintly. Charles put his hand on Erik’s neck and found a trembling pulse. He replayed the last few moments in his mind. Erik had thrown Charles to the floor as Shaw had released his attack, putting his back between both of them and the explosion. 

They lay a few feet from where Charles had been sitting. His wheelchair was on its side, one wheel still rotating slowly. Charles knew from long experience that he had no hope of getting back into the chair on his own. 

He looked up at the smoggy London sky, feeling a cool gust flow over his skin. It turned the tears on his cheeks to cold trickles – the air was full of ash, his eyes were watering freely. He wiped at them, making things worse because his sleeve was so sooty. His cheeks felt raw as if badly sunburned. And then he smelled the smoke.

It was a complex mix of burning wood, opium and oil. Charles glanced around frantically, but could see no billows of smoke yet. And then he glanced down between his hands and saw an orange glint through the gaps in the floorboards.

Shaw had lit the workshop on fire.

“Erik,” Charles whispered, his eardrums giving a sharp twinge as his hearing began to return. He grabbed his friend’s shoulder and shook it violently. “Erik, wake up, we have to get out!”

Erik’s lips moved, one hand twitched, but his eyes did not open. A trail of blood was making its way down the horizontal of his forehead.

There was nothing else for it. Charles looked around again, trying to judge the best route out. The doorway to the stairs was blocked by a tumble of bricks, but the door Charles had arrived through might give an alternative route. At worst, they could reach the pulley lift and cut the rope. Plunging one story would not be pleasant, but it was better than waiting here for the fire to reach them. Charles wriggled on his elbows until he was pressed close to Erik, shuffled forward a foot and hooked one elbow beneath Erik’s underarm. He took a breath and then hauled with all his strength, dragging Erik a few inches. 

Beneath him, he could hear the cracking of wooden crates collapsing. 

He pulled himself forward another foot, dragged Erik further, repeating the movements over and over as the smoke began to stream in hazy lines from between the boards. He had got as far as the doorway on pure adrenalin before his arms began to cramp. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to move again. Another few inches. Drag Erik into line. Another few inches. Drag Erik. A few inches.

Behind him, the fire had swarmed up through the warped floor around Shaw’s desk and was spreading across the walls of the office. They were almost fully in the hall, and Charles knew they had a better chance of keeping the flame back if he could get the door shut. He hauled his body all the way around, picked up his legs and placed them out of the way, then stretched as far as he could until his straining fingers could just scrape the bottom edge of the door and pull it closed. For a moment it just bumped against the bolt, the last inch blocked, but Charles took a breath and pulled with his fingertips as hard as he could and the bolt clicked into the door jam.

He lay panting in the corridor for a moment, sweat dripping down his face and leaving sooty drips on the bare wood. Just ahead, Erik was stirring at last. Charles felt a swell of relief to feel his friend’s mind waking, confused and in pain but relatively intact. He mumbled wordlessly as he turned his head to the side and massaged the bridge of his nose.

“Hurry,” Charles panted. “Pull yourself awake, Erik, we’ve got to—”

The fire must have reached the ceiling inside the office. There was low shifting noise, like some ancient beast dragging itself to the mouth of its lair, and then a crack that made Charles lie flat and throw his hands over his head. The air filled with sparks and ash and noise, and Charles bellowed into his own arm. And then it was over.

He raised his head slowly. Erik was rolling onto his side, groaning and touching his head, smearing the blood there into something that looked like an arcane symbol. Charles took stock of his own body quickly, but felt no pain or the wetness of a fresh wound. He reached out to touch the nearest part of Erik, which was his ankle.

He couldn’t quite reach. He braced himself on his other elbow and pulled himself forward – but he couldn’t. His body seemed impossibly heavy.

Slowly, and then in a desperate rush, he turned to look back over his shoulder.

The ceiling of the corridor behind him had collapsed, crushing the interior wall of Shaw’s office and spilling the slow-burning wood of heavy ceiling beams into the hall. One of the thick ribs had fallen, intact, right across Charles’ legs. 

Charles sucked in a gasp and strained forward as hard as he could, but the beam did not even wobble.

“Erik,” he croaked, turning back. His friend was pushing himself up with the support of the wall, and Charles reached out a hand. “Don’t stand up, stay low! The smoke--”

“What?” Erik wiggled one thumb in his ear.

“I said, stay low!” Charles yelled. Erik crouched down. “I need your help. The beam –-”

Erik’s face snapped alert and he crawled on hands and knees to where Charles lay trapped. “I have it,” he hissed, putting his hands under the thin gap between the beam and the floor. “I’ll just—” his lips pulled back from his teeth and his features strained and purpled with exertion. He propped one foot up against the beam and tried again. “It’s heavy- ah!” his hands slipped and he nearly fell forward onto the burning rubble beyond. The beam hadn’t moved an inch.

“Can you use your… your powers?” Charles tried to twist his body to look back more easily, but his back was stiff with the old injury and would only curve so far. “Lift the nails?”

Erik flattened his hands and ran them through the air over the beam, as if divining. “There’s no nails or bolts here, it’s all slot building,” Erik grimaced and cursed. A billow of smoke flowed off the rubble and Erik waved it away with one hand, then slumped back, coughing so hard he tumbled onto one elbow beside Charles.

Charles felt a gradual poison of controlled fear spread through him. He focused on keeping his voice steady. “Erik, you need to go and find help. Someone will have heard the explosion. People will be coming to fight the fire. Go and find them and bring them to help.”

Erik looked across at the flames spreading up the walls at the dead end of the corridor and trailing out the gaping hole above Shaw’s office, dancing up into the night. The heat had grown so intense now that it made Charles blink.

“There isn’t time,” Erik cried above the cracking of the wood and the flames’ spluttering. “It’s spreading too quickly.”

“Erik,” Charles fought to restrict the poison inside him, the certain knowledge that he absolutely must hide from his friend. “It’s the only chance I have. Run and don’t look back until you find someone.”

Erik looked at him fully now, and Charles tried to keep his face calm, but he failed miserably. Erik pulled off his singed leather coat and lay down, holding it up to shield their shoulders and heads from the heat. “You want me to abandon you.”

“I want you to find help,” Charles insisted. “There isn’t time to argue!”

“You mean to die and make me flee,” Erik corrected him. “Charles, I won’t leave you here.”

Charles felt his eyes begin to water from the smoke. Or perhaps he was crying. Oh, God, forgive him all he’d done, he’d only meant to trim the rot from the world. “Then I’m ordering you, if you care for me at all, to go. I won’t be the death of you.”

“ _Nicht, bitte,_ ” Erik sobbed, taking hold of Charles’ injured hand. “You’re not going to die here alone, I can’t bear it!” and then he gave a hoarse laugh. “You can’t make me go.”

“Think of Edie,” Charles tightened his grip on Erik’s hand. His palm hurt like a hundred wasp stings.

“I am thinking of Edie. I’m thinking of how unbearable I’ll be to live with if you’re gone.”

Charles gave a shaking smile. “Then Shaw – think of Shaw. Don’t let him get away with this. You have to finish the job for me.”

Erik shook his head. He lay down on the boards, pulled Charles’ hand towards his mouth and kissed the grimy knuckles, still supporting the shield with his other elbow. He said quietly, “No.”

Charles lowered his twisted body until his face was in line with Erik’s, their noses inches apart. The fire was filling the end of the corridor now, a solid blanket of smoke billowing above their head and the flames eating closer and closer to the beam that marked the beginning of Charles’ body. He did not want to die, God, he had never wanted anything less in his life. His mother had felt this in her last minutes. How perfect, what symmetrical justice. He stammered through his tears. “I can m-make us go to sleep. So we’re asleep when it h-happens.”

“I’m not afraid of pain,” Erik whispered.

“I am,” Charles grinned. He was pretty sure it looked like a grimace. 

“Then do it,” Erik let go of his hand and smoothed the sweat-soaked hair from Charles’ forehead, his thumb rubbing a calloused trail along Charles’ eyebrow. “We’ll be asleep together. Like a poem by one of the Romantics.”

“I would have stayed with you no matter how long we lived,” Charles promised, grabbing for Erik’s hand again. “Another fifty years, a hundred.”

“I would have loved you, wrinkled and bald with a blanket on your lap,” Erik rasped. “Grumbling about the weather.”

“Can’t stand the heat, makes my back swell,” Charles laughed. “Oh, God, Erik-”

Erik pressed forward and silenced him with a kiss. As he closed his eyes to savour it, Charles released Erik’s hand and put his fingers to his temple. 

_Hush now,_ he told both their minds, locking them together like two cogs in a pocket watch. _Go to sleep._

\---

Outside, the bells of the hand-pump fire engines cracked open the sleepy silence and the smoke rose a thousand feet into the London night. 

\---

Erik’s conscious mind opened in waves like petals, and the sunlight fell through the layers one by one until he blinked his eyes open. He saw the world as blue as Charles’ eyes, and his stinging corneas gradually focused the blue into painted walls and a white-edged window. His muscles twitched and pain rippled through him. The skin of his face hurt. The back of his head hurt. His legs really hurt, a harsh, raw pain that he knew meant not-insignificant burns. Sluggishly, he tried to draw himself a picture of where he could be and what had happened. 

The burning corridor came back to him suddenly. He twitched again, and turned his head right and then left.

Charles lay in a small bed beside him, a bed with white sheets and white pillowcases and a dark blue blanket tucked neatly into the mattress at the corners. Charles’ cheeks and lips were blistered and peeling, and his far hand was bandaged thickly and lying on top of his chest. But his eyes were blue and wide and looking directly at Erik. He smiled.

Erik tried to make a word, but his throat felt like it was full of razors. Charles understood – he could read minds, Erik remembered in a rush, and put it aside until later – and he said in a sandpapery voice, “We’re in hospital.”

“How?” Erik managed to say.

“Firemen. Must have arrived just after we went to sleep. I think I called them without knowing it. My mind. Summoned them like sheep dogs.”

“You’re not making sense,” Erik mumbled, though he suspected Charles sort of was, just not enough for Erik to cope with so soon after waking.

“Morphine,” Charles replied.

“What?”

“Morphine. They gave me a lot of morphine,” Charles’ voice was a little over-rounded, as if he was slightly drunk. “It’s an opiate. It’s an opiate, Erik. It’s making the headaches go away. I can’t even hear the minds of the people next door. It’s dulling my mind and saving my life just as Shaw promised,” Charles’ shoulders shuddered with silent laughter.

“What’s so amusing now?”

“I woke up in another room,” Charles croaked. “You weren’t there. The nurse came in and found I was awake, and she sat down and looked so terribly gloomy, and she said – oh, it’s too funny – she said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I had the most awful fright because I thought she meant you had died in the fire. But then she said, ‘they had to take the leg, sir’ and I just laughed and laughed,” Charles’ smile was wide and a little hysterical, but so beautiful. “I’ve only got one leg. That’s all we lost.”

Erik couldn’t stop himself from joining in. The bruises and burns across his body ached as his chest heaved with laughter. “That is pretty funny,” he wheezed. “That’s pretty funny, Charles.”

In the hall outside, through a heavy door with a window like a porthole, Erik could hear Edie talking to a man that his brain soon registered as Murray MacTaggert. Beyond that he could hear the rattle of a trolley and the tidy shuffle of nurses hurrying up and down the ward. He didn’t believe in safety, but he thought this was pretty close to it. 

Charles lifted his uninjured hand and stretched into the space between their beds. Erik took a few moments to coordinate his protesting body, and then he reached across to meet him. There was just a little too much distance, but their fingertips hooked together tentatively. 

Soon, sleep began to sink across Erik in a slow fog and he couldn’t hold his eyelids up, let alone his hand. Their fingertips parted and hung over the edges of their beds. They didn’t speak further anyway. They had time to tell each other everything, whenever they chose to speak again. There would be all the time they needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading! I have a huge amount of nostalgia for this fic, so it was difficult to make changes to it when I was reposting it. I am open to concrit or comments on what did and didn't work, stylistically or in terms of plot/characterisation/etc.


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